BURNS NIGHTS 



AT THE 



BURNS CLUB OF ST. LOUIS 




Bonk_ J _£_ s 3JI 



PRESENTED l!V 










President 

The Burns Club of St. Louis 



Burns Nights 

at the Burns Club of St. Louis 



TWO ARTISTS OF THE PEOPLE 
Albert Douglas 

THE BIRTH O' TAM O'SHANTER 

Thomas Agustine Daly 

GENIUS AND GEOGRAPHY 
Rev. Dr. James W. Lee 

THE SCOTCH ACCORDING TO JOHNSON 
Frederick W. Lehmann 

ROBERT BURNS, AN IMMORTAL MEMORY 
Henry King 

THE MUSE OF ROBERT BURNS 
Irvin Mattick 

LINES TO ST. LOUIS BURNSIANS 
M. Hunter 



Edited, with Notes, by 
WALTER B. STEVENS 



Printed for Private Distribution 

to Lovers of Burns 

by 

The Burns Club of St. Louis 

1918 






THE MEM'RY O' BURNS 



truuz^. ft. QJuZ^. 



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Burns Nights 

J\ CROSS the upper front of the quaint House of the Artists' 
Guild is the long, vaulted chamber of the Bums Club of 
St. Louis. It is a reproduction of the* living room of the Burns 
Cottage at Ayr. In this chamber the members of the club 
assemble on the twenty-fifth of January to keep the anniversay of 
the birth of the poet and at such other times as special meetings 
may be called. With few exceptions the articles which furnish 
the room are associated with the memory of Bums. Portraits 
of the Burns family, pictures of the places made famous by the 
writings of Bums, facsimiles of the letters and poems of Burns 
cover the walls. 

In one* end of the chamber is the huge, old-fashioned chim- 
ney and fireplace, with a spinning wheel and reel of the Armour 
family in the corner. The opposite comer contains a sideboard 
of ancient pattern on the shelves of which are arranged plates 
and bowls and ashets of the days of Bums. But there are other 
things in the chamber which give even more "atmosphere." Bex- 
side the fireplace, as if ready for immediate use, hang the iron 
holder of "Bonnie Jean," and the* griddle on which the cakes 
were baked over the coals. One of the tables was owned by 
Burns zvhen he lived at Dumfries, another table was in the Tarn 
o' Shanter Inn and a third table* was made of wood from St. 
Michael's Church at Dumfries. A little chair was the favorite 
seat of Burns when he was a child. The milking stool of "Bon- 
nie Jean," an eight-day clock one hundred and thirty-five years 
old, — these and many other relics are treasured by the club. 

Burns Nights of the Bums Club of St. Louis pass all too 
quickly. No two of them are alike but there are some features 
which are never omitted. None of thexse Burns Nights passes 
without additions to the Bumsiana of the club, to be inspected 
and discussed. After the assembling in the chamber, the guests 
and members go down to the* rathskeller and take their places at 
the long table. They stand while the president pronounces the 
Burns grace. Usually there is present at least one clergyman. 
The look upon the* face of this guest is a study as President 
Bixby seriously intones'. 

"Some hae meat and nae can eat, 

And some there be* that want it, 
But we hae meat and we can eat 
And sae the Lord be thankit." 



Then William Porteous, the glorious singer of the club, gives 
"Afton Water," or something of like beautiful sentiment from the 
Scotch. In the early service of the dinner President Bixby rises 
to recall that on June 23rd, 1785, Robert Burns addressed his 
famous farewell to the brethren of St. James Lodge, Tarbolton. 
This message holds good on the anniversary of Burns' birth with 
all Burns clubs: 

"A last request permit me here* 
When yearly ye assemble a, 
One round, I ask it with a tear, 
To him, the Bard that's far awa." 

The members of the club stand and drink to "the Bard that's 
far awa." Before he\ is allowed to take his seat, Mr. Porteous 
sings, it may be "Duncan Gray." Then follow in rapid succession 
such readings from Burns as "Address to the Unco Guid," letters 
of greeting from other Burns Clubs, Scotch stories. In Scott H. 
Blewett the club has a reader of rare native* power, who brings 
out the\ full sentiment and beauty of the Scotch dialect. Again 
and again Mr. Porteous is brought to his feet and leads the club 
in singing "Scots Wha Hae," "Coming Through the Rye," "O — a 
the Ants," "Red, Red Rose," "Ye Banks and Braes," "John An- 
derson, My Joe," "My Nannie's Awa," "A Man's a Man for a' 
That," and so on through a soul-stirring range of Scotch melodies. 

At the proper stage of the dinner haggis is brought in and 
passed around the table, a piper playing the bagpipes. Scotch 
cakes are at every plate. 

After the dinner come the more formal proceedings, the 
address of the evening and the comments thereon by the\ mem- 
bers and guests. 

Burns Night closes invariably with guests and members as- 
sembled again in the club room, hands joined and all singing 
"Auld Lang Syne." 



The Club's Burnsiana 

T N a strong box is preserved the club's growing and invalu- 
able collection of literary Burnsiana. Here are the 
manuscripts, or original typewritten copies, of the addresses 
and poems which have made the Burns Nights of the club 
historic. Among them: 

"Burns and Religion," by Rev. Dr. William C. Bitting; 

"Burns, the World Poet," by William Marion Reedy; 

"Burns and English Poetry," by Professor J. L. Lowes; 

"Burns and the Prophet Isaiah," by Judge M. N. Sale; 

"Burns and the Auld Clay Biggin," by Frederick W. 
Lehmann; 

"Lines to Burns," by Chang Yow Tong, of World's Fair 
fame; 

"To Robert Burns," by Orrick Johns; 

"To the Bard of Auld Lang Syne," by Professor James 
Main Dixon; 

"Robert Burns," by Willis Leonard McClanahan. 

The collection of the club's publications includes the 
large book of "Poems and Letters in the Handwriting of 
Robert Burns, Reproduced in facsimile through the courtesy 
of William K. Bixby and Frederick W. Lehmann;" and the 
two smaller books, "Burns Nights in St. Louis," and "Nights 
wi' Burns in St. Louis." 

The latest addition to the contents of the strong box 
was made at the annual meeting of 1917. It is a dainty, 
privately-printed book containing in facsimile Burns' poem 
"To Mary in Heaven," with an introduction by William K. 
Bixby, who possesses the original manuscript of this "the 
most beautiful of all the lyrics of Burns and one of the most 
celebrated poems ever written." 

From John Gribbell, of Philadelphia, the Burns Club of 
St. Louis received one of the few copies in facsimile of the 
Glenriddell Manuscripts. As he announced the gift and laid 
before the members for their delighted inspection the two 
precious volumes, President Bixby told this reminiscence of 
his own relationship to the famous collection of Glenriddell 
manuscripts: 

"A dealer in rare books brought to my summer home on 
Lake George the original Glenriddell Manuscripts of Burns. 
I had seen in the newspapers accounts of the sale of these 
Manuscripts by the Liverpool Athenaeum and of the storm 
of condemnation from all Scotland — the calling of public 
meetings to institute legal proceedings to compel the recovery 



of the Manuscripts. The dealer said to me that the collection 
had been consigned to him to get it away from England 
and that it was for sale. He left the two volumes with me 
for several days. When he returned I told him that for my 
own use I would as soon purchase the painting of Mona 
Lisa, which had been stolen recently from the Louvre, as I 
should feel that I had to apologize for having the collection 
in my possession. I suggested to the dealer the name of a 
person in Philadelphia who might be interested in the 
volumes for a large college to which the family had given 
a very valuable library. The dealer started for Philadelphia, 
but sold to Mr. Gribbell. The whole world knows the splen- 
did use that Mr. Gribbell has made of the Manuscripts, giving 
the originals to remain alternate years in Glasgow and 
Edinburgh until a more permanent place may be provided." 

The history of the Glenriddell Manuscripts is one more 
apt illustration of the esteem, increasing with time, for all 
that is associated with Burns. In 1796, after the death of 
Burns, his friends arranged for a publication of the life and 
works of the poet for the benefit of the widow and children. 
From various sources letters and manuscript poems were 
assembled and delivered to Dr. Currie, who was chosen to 
prepare the book. Dr. Currie agreed "that whatever was done 
as to the returning any letters, papers, etc., should be con- 
sidered the act of the widow and transacted in her name." 
The Currie edition of Burns was issued in 1800. Dr. Currie 
died without returning the Glenriddell Manuscripts. These 
papers were in two volumes. The volumes were entitled: 
"Poems and Letters written by Mr. Robert Burns and selected 
by him from his unprinted collection for Robert Riddell, Esq., 
of Glenriddell." As an introductive to the volumes Burns 
wrote: 

"As this collection almost wholly consists of pieces, local 
or unprinted fragments, the effusion of a poetical moment, 
and bagatelles strung in rhyme simply pour passer la temps, 
the author trusts that nobody into whose hands it may come 
will, without his permission, give or allow to be taken, copies 
of anything here contained; much less to give to the world at 
large, what he never meant should see the light. At the 
gentleman's request, whose from this time it shall be, the 
collection was made; and to him, and I will add to his 
amiable lady, it is presented, as a sincere though small tribute 
of gratitude for the many happy hours the author has spent 
under their roof. There, what Poverty even though accom- 
panied with Genius must seldom expect to meet with in the 
circles of fashionable life, his welcome has ever been the 
cordiality of Kindness and the warmth of Friendship. As 

6 



from the situation in which it is now placed this Mss. may 
be preserved and this Preface read, when the hand that now 
writes and the heart that now dictates it may be mouldering 
in the dust; let these be regarded the genuine sentiments of 
a man who seldom flattered any and never those he loved. 
27th Apir 17— 

ROBT BURNS." 

In 1853 Dr. Currie's daughter-in-law, possibly actuated 
by a literary house cleaning, passed the two volumes of 
Manuscripts to the Liverpool Athenaeum with this note: 

"Will you allow me to make you the medium of present- 
ing to the Athenaeum Library two manuscript books in his 
own handwriting of Poems and Letters of Burns. I believe 
they came into the possession of Dr. Currie when he was 
engaged in writing the Life of the Poet; and I shall feel 
gratified by their finding a place in the Library of an institu- 
tion in which he took so great an interest." 

The two books of Manuscripts lay hidden in a wooden 
box at the Athenaeum twenty years, until 1873, so little value 
was placed upon them. In 1873, a merchant, Henry A. 
Bright, found the books and provided a glass case for them. 
Forty years later, about 1913, the thrifty — to use a mild 
word — Athenaeum management concluded to turn these 
Burns' writings into cash. A London firm of dealers in such 
things was given a six months' option on the two books at 
$10,000. After a sale had actually been made the heirs of 
Burns and the public generally learned of the action of the 
Athenaeum. The heirs set up no claim except to insist that 
the books be placed in some institution. But the lovers of 
Burns organized. Through Miss Annie Burns of Chelten- 
ham, the only surviving grandchild, they went into court. At 
this point the dealers, who had bought as a speculation, sent 
the two books to this country to find a purchaser. 

John Gribbell bought and immediately announced his 
purpose to send the original volumes to Scotland. He had 
a few copies made in facsimile, one of which he gave through 
President Bixby to the Burns Club of St. Louis. Mr. 
Gribbell's letter which accompanies the volumes gives this 
account of the transaction: 

"The two volumes of the Manuscripts, which have been 
long known as the 'Glenriddell Manuscripts' of Robert Burns, 
were offered to me for sale in Philadelphia in November, 
1913, by an American dealer, to my great surprise. I had 
supposed they were still in England subject to the proceed- 
ings which were contemplated by the Scotts Committee who 
were striving to have the original sale by the Liverpool 

7 



Athenaeum cancelled. My object in purchasing them was 
that they might be sent to Scotland in perpetual security. 
I purchased them on November 21st. On the same day I 
advised the Earl of Roscbery, chairman of the Scotts Com- 
mittee, of my possession of them, and that these Manuscripts 
were now a gift to the people of Scotland forever. The deed 
of gift which is herein set forth has been executed. 

JOHN GRIBBELL. 
Sept. 10, 1914, Philadelphia." 

The club's Burnsiana includes a facsimile copy of the 
famous "Geddes Burns," with the Geddes bookplate. This 
is a copy of the first Edinburgh edition of Burns' Poems, but 
enhanced in value with twenty-seven closely written pages 
in the handwriting of the poet and the letter of Burns trans- 
mitting the book to Rev. Dr. Alexander Geddes, afterward 
Bishop Geddes, a Roman Catholic clergyman of Edinburgh. 
Burns and Dr. Geddes were intimate friends. Burns took the 
book from Dr. Geddes as he was starting on his tour of the 
Highlands, with the understanding that he would jot down 
in verse on the blank leaves whatever he found which he 
thought might interest his friend. He wrote into the book 
twelve poems. Further, in this book, he filled out with his 
pen the names for which he had used only initials in print. 
In his earlier editions Burns often used only initials of the 
names of persons he treated with satirical freedom. The 
history of the passage of the Geddes Burns from one posses- 
sor to another until a limited edition in facsimile was issued 
is a long and interesting one. A copy of this record is in 
the possession of the Burns Club of St. Louis. 

The war has bestowed its tinge on Burns Nights. Greet- 
ing after greeting from the Federated Burns Clubs in foreign 
parts has come to the Burns Club of St. Louis in coverings 
bearing in ominous black type, "Opened by Censor." And 
not seldom the contents have been impregnated with the war 
spirit. Thus from the Kilbowie Jolly Beggars Club: 

"Even in this hour 
When Britain draws the sword 
To save her peerless prestige from the Hun, 
We must do honour to Scotia's greatest son. 
Each freeman turns 
To hear the burden of his song 

That stirs the soul and makes the weakling strong, 
And every Scot, as in the days of yore, 
Will do or die until our cause is won. 

Inspired by Burns." 



The Stane Mossgiel Burns Club sent this greeting: 

"Though strife goes on, and discord for a while 
May rankle in the souls of men, 
A truce we call — symbolic of a peace to come 
In that great prophecy for rank and file, 
That man to man o'er land and sea 
Shall war no more, but brithers be." 



There was a Lad was born in Kyle 

A favorite song of The Burns Club of St. Louis 
Sung by William M. Porteous 

"There was a lad was born in Kyle, 
But whatna day, o' whatna stylo, 
I doubt it's hardly worth the while, 
To be sae nice wi' Robin. 

CHORUS. 
For Robin was a rovin' boy, 

A rantin', rovin' rantin', rover, 
Robin was a rovin' boy, 

rantin', rovin' Robin. 

(2) Our monarch's hindmost year but ane 

Was five and twenty days begun, 
'Twas then a blast o' Janwar' win' 
Blew Hansel in on Robin. 

(3) The gossip keekit in his loof, 

Quo' she, Wha lives will see the proof, 
This waly boy will be nae coof; 

1 think we'll ca' him Robin. 

(4) He'll hae misfortunes great and sma', 

But aye a heart aboon them a'; 
He'll be a credit till us a', — 
We'll a' be proud o' Robin. 

(5) But sure as three times three mak' nine, 

I see by ilka score and line, 
This chap will dearly like our kin', 
So leeze me on thee, Robin." 



1917 

HpHE guests of Burns Night of 1917 were John Hill, Rev. 
A Dr. J. W. Lee, Rev. Dr. J. W. Maclvor, N. A. McMillan 
and Irvin Mattick. 

A most pleasing incident of this Burns Night was the 
action taken on the initiative of President Bixby upon the 
absence of the vice-president of the club, David R. Francis. 
President Bixby offered this sentiment: 

"Russian bodies, use him we'el 
An hap him in a cozie biel. 
Ye'll find him ay a dainty chiel 
And fou o' glee. 
He wad na wrang'd the vera deil 
That's ower the sea." 

The sentiment was adopted as the feeling of the club. 
The health of the Ambassador to Russia was drank and, by 
a unanimous vote, a cablegram of greeting was sent to the 
absent member at Petrograd. 

The address of this Burns Night was by Albert Douglas 
of Washington, D. C. It drew a most interesting comparison 
between Burns and Millet, developing unusual lines of 
thought about Burns. At the conclusion of the address the 
club expressed its appreciation in a rising vote of thanks 
and in an earnest request that a copy of the address be given 
by Mr. Douglas for the next edition of "Burns Nights." 

Very appropriate to the treatment of Burns by Mr. 
Douglas were the readings of two selections from "Thoughts 
of a Toiler," a book of recent publication by W. Hunter, a 
Scotch author, and presented by him to the Burns Club of 
St. Louis. These readings of "Juist for Burns' Sake" in 
verse and "Burns and the Commonplace" in prose were given 
impressively by Frederick W. Lehmann. 

A poem written for this Burns Night by Irvin Mattick 
and read by the author was highly appreciated, as shown by 
the hearty vote of thanks and the request for publication. 

The informal program of this Burns Night was unusually 
rich and full. Letters by Burns to Miss Craik and to his 
longtime friend and critic, Mrs. Dunlop, were read and dis- 
cussed. The guests of the evening, Drs. Lee and Maclvor 
and John Hill, spoke as did Professor Lowes, Judge Sale, 
Vice-President Johns and other members of the club. And 
at every interval the sweet singer of the club, William 
Porteous, responded graciously to the insistent calls. 

10 



Conversation reminiscent of the delightful Burns Night 
of 1916 and of Tom Daly's fascinating narrative in verse of 
"The Birth of Tarn o' Shanter" brought out the information 
from a member that the special guest of the evening, Mr. 
Albert Douglas, knew "Tarn" better than any other person 
present. Prevailed upon by the members, Mr. Douglas 
recited "Tarn o' Shanter" from beginning to end, without a 
single halt to look at the text and in a manner which gave 
the club a new vision of this Burns masterpiece. 

Very appropriately at this time President Bixby exhib- 
ited to the club a rare first issue of the first edition of 
"Tarn o' Shanter." On the title page "Aloway Kirk" appears 
with only one "1". Before the full edition was printed the 
mistake in the title was corrected. Only two or three copies 
of this issue are recorded as having been put on sale in 
America, while not a single copy is listed in the English 
"Book Prices Current." On the title page appears in quaint 
type: 

Aloway Kirk 
or 
Tarn o' Shanter 
a Tale 
by 
Robert Burns 
The Ayrshire Poet. 
"Whae 'er this tale o' truth shall read, 
Ilk man and mother's son tak heed; 
Whane 'er to Drink you are inclin'd 
Or Cutty Sarks run in your mind, 
Think — ye may buy the joys o'er dear; 
Remember Tarn o' Shanter's mare."* 
After the recitation by Mr. Douglas and the examination 
of the book, members of the club turned with added apprecia- 
tion to the original drawings made by John Burnet to illus- 
trate "Tarn o' Shanter," which hang upon the walls of the 
club chamber. They looked with new interest upon one of 
their relics — the old arm chair of Mrs. Tarn o' Shanter: 
"Where sits our sulky sullen dame, 
Gathering her brows like gathering storm, 
Nursing her wrath to keep it warm." 



11 



Two Artists of the People 

By Albert Douglas of Washington, D. C. 

January 25, 1917 

A T first thought it may seem far-fetched if not fantastic 

to claim that Robert Burns and Jean Francois Millet are 
as artists near akin. But as we look more closely we may 
come to agree that, while the career and the character of 
the French painter differed much from those of the Scots 
poet, yet in the outward circumstances of their lives, in their 
artistic outlook upon nature and humanity, as well as in the 
essential message which each as an artist has left us they 
have much in common. 

Born under very similar conditions, as sons of small 
tenant farmers; subjected in childhood and youth to similar 
influences; growing to manhood through years of toil and 
self-denial; each seeking in the interest of his art his 
country's capital; retiring one to Ellisland and Dumfries and 
the other to Barbizon; dying both in pecuniary distress and 
comparative obscurity; the fame of each, resting upon much 
the same popular sentiment and appreciation, has grown 
through all the passing years. 

In temperament too the men were in many respects 
alike; though Millet seems to have had little taste for social 
or convivial pleasures, and either lacked or restrained the 
ardent, illy-regulated sexual instinct which has repelled many 
from Burns, and, as himself deplored: — "laid him low and 
stained his name." While both men in the home exemplified 
the ideal, so well expressed by Burns: 

"To make a happy fireside clime 

for weans and wife, 
That's the true pathos and sublime 
of human life." 

But to attempt to follow this comparison item by item and 
trait by trait would soon become uninteresting if not fantastic. 
Rather let us take the life and the artistic career of one of 
these men, and briefly trace his story and development; 
trusting that the likeness may, to some extent at least, 
suggest itself. And, because the incidents of the life and 
career of Burns are to most of us the more familiar, we will 
choose the story of Millet. 

Few of the thousands of tourists who land each year of 
normal travel at Cherbourg apprehend how near they are to 

12 



one of the most beautiful, remote and interesting districts of 
France. The city is at the eastern end of a square oeninsular 
that thrusts itself out into the English Channel, northwesterly 
from the mainland of France. The district is known as La 
Manche, the very significant French name for the English 
Channel; and its rolling downs, grey stone churches, low 
thatched cottages; its meadows and its orchards, its cattle 
and sheep, remind one strikingly of Dorset and Devon; and 
the people are such as those who move in the novels of Eden 
Phillpotts. 

Far out at the northwest corner of this district, ten miles 
west of Cherbourg, is the headland of La Hague, looking 
out across the narrow sea, The Race of Alderney, towards 
the Channel Islands. The coast is indeed stern and rock- 
bound. Its granite walls, rising high above the Atlantic and 
worn by the elements into fantastic shapes, look down upon 
the spot where the Kearsage destroyed the Alabama in 1864. 

This part of the peninsular comprises the village-dis- 
trict of Greville, and out among the cliffs, nestling in a glen 
almost within stone-throw of the sea, is the tiny hamlet of 
Gruchy; consisting of eight or ten rough, grey stone houses, 
strung along one street, that runs east and west and is 
joined by another roadway from the south. 

In one of these grey houses farthest to the east was 
born, a century ago, Jean Francois Millet, the peasant painter 
of France. The place today is much, indeed one may almost 
say just, as it was one hundred years ago. The same remote, 
brooding quiet save for the surf at the foot of the adjacent 
rocks. The same rolling pastures. The same copious spring 
near the fork of the road, where the village women still wash 
and beat their linen. The same ancient well with its roof of 
stone; and the same hard, penurious, peasant life. 

It is natural for one familiar with the lives of both men, 
as he stands beside this stone cottage, to compare this scene 
with the clay "biggin" on the banks of Doon, near the Irish 
sea, in Ayrshire; and Millet's with the career of the peasant- 
poet of Scotland. Indeed one biographer of Millet, telling 
of the associations of his youth, writes: — "In their patriarchal 
simplicity and Puritan virtue these Norman peasants were 
like the Scottish Presbyterians, — and in the natural order of 
things out of this life of plain living and high thinking there 
sprang the great poem of peasant life which was this painter's 
message to the world." 

This might have been written of Burns; for the circum- 
stances of his early years very closely resemble those of 

13 



Millet. Both were subject to the same pregnant influence 
of devout parents and patriarchal home life. Both spent 
much the same sort of laborious youth amid rural scenes in 
the remote districts where they were born. Rigid economy, 
toil and responsibility beyond his years brought each to an 
early maturity. In each was developed deep religious faith 
and strong independence of soirit; and ultimately, each in his 
own language forcibly interpreted the dignity of labor, the 
worth of character and the value of the individual man. To 
each was revealed the beauty and the artistic value of the 
common life of fireside and field, of men and women, of bird 
and beast and flower. One became a poet and the other a 
painter of humanity; each giving expression to new ideals 
and to modern ideas in striking and original forms. 

For twenty years and more Millet lived at Greville and 
shared the earnest, laborious and religious life of his home 
and surroundings. He was fortunate, as it has been suggested 
Burns was fortunate, in his father, mother and the influences 
of his home. Education, knowledge were for their own sake 
greatly esteemed, so that, though books were not easy to 
come by, Millet, like Burns, acquired a somewhat remarkable 
mental cultivation, read much and thought deeply. His 
father, Jean Louis Millet, a tall, slight man, had neither the 
appearance nor the limitations of the average rustic of his 
time. He was a man of some refinement both in his appear- 
ance and tastes; with dark eyes, rather long, brown hair and 
shapely hands. He too had a fine voice, was fond of music 
and trained the village choir of Greville until it became 
noted in the neighborhood and people came from all the 
vicinity to hear it sing, in the low stone church which his 
son was to immortalize in one of the last of his paintings, and 
before which the son's statute now stands. He also modelled 
in clay, carved wood and loved and studied, and taught this 
eldest son to see and note the trees, birds, plants and scenes 
of nature about him. His mother, though a hard working- 
woman in house and field, was one who possessed some edu- 
cation and was noted for her neat and cleanly appearance. 
Then too his grandmother, who made her eldest grandson 
her special property and took care of him while his parents 
worked in the field or tended their sheep and cattle, taught 
him much, as Burns' maternal aunt taught him, of the wisdom, 
sayings and songs of the countryside. 

So Millet grew to manhood amidst scenes and under in- 
fluences which imparted to him the important truth which 
he afterwards in a letter thus expressed: — "It is essential to 

14 



use the commonplace in order to express the sublime." And 
as we read these words how many of the lines of Burns come 
to mind; some as familiar as these: 

"But mousie thou are not thy lane 
In proving foresight may be vain, 
The best laid schemes o' mice an men 

gang aft agley 
An lea' us nought but grief an pain 
for promised joy." 

And what more offensively "commonplace" than a louse! 
But one seen upon a Sunday bonnet gave us that "sublime" 
sermon in little: 

"O wad some Power the giftie gie us 
To see oursels as others see us 
It wad frae monie a blunder free us 

an foolish notion: 
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us 
and ev'n devotion." 

As Millet approached manhood it was his father who 
appreciated his artistic temperament and capacity; encour- 
aged him to draw, praised his sketches of the men and women 
and the scenes that attracted the boy's pencil; and finally took 
him to Cherbourg to see old Mouchel, an artist there. They 
took with them two of the sketches and found it difficult to 
persuade Mouchel that the boy, unaided and untaught, had 
made them. So this artist kept Millet by him for six months, 
encouraged him to draw whatever he felt tempted to portray; 
and to study the pictures in the small public gallery at 
Cherbourg. 

Then the boy's father died and, as the oldest son, he had 
to go home and, as did Burns, in a measure take charge of 
the family, the grandmother and the mother and the seven 
brothers and sisters, as well as of the little farm. 

But his work at Cherbourg had attracted the attention of 
some men of influence and the Mayor wrote him urging him 
to return to the city and pursue his artistic studies. This his 
grandmother determined should be accomplished and so 
finally it was, and he went into the studio of the principal 
painter of the town, Langlois, who had studied in Paris and 
in Italy. He like Mouchel recognized Millet's talent at once, 
and after some months addressed a petition, in behalf of 
young Millet, to the town council of Cherbourg, which 

15 



resulted after some delays in an arrangement between the city 
and the district, by which six hundred francs a year was 
promised to Millet for his support while he studied his art 
in Paris. 

So at the age of twenty-two Millet began the second 
period of his life. For twelve years he lived, studied and 
suffered in Paris. At the end of two or three years he was 
called home and lived some months there and in Cherbourg; 
trying, often in the most humble way, to make a living with 
his brush. In Cherbourg he now married a slight, little dress- 
maker, whose portrait he had painted for a few francs. With 
her he returned to his life of privation in Paris. Only the 
first installment of six hundred francs was paid him by the 
authorities of Cherbourg. The second year the sum dwindled 
to three hundred and then ceased altogether; so that the 
young artist was thrown upon his own resources for a liv- 
ing for himself and his young wife; whose frail constitution 
gave way until she died. Millet found Paris and his life there 
and most of the artistic development of the time and place 
thoroughly distasteful. The Salon and the Beaux-Arts were 
dominated by artificial and conventional ideals. Millet, moved 
indeed, dominated by an almost passionate sincerity and the 
impulse to seek for essential truth, was filled with distaste 
for the classical conventions and theatrical display of the 
painters who for the time represented such artistic taste as 
found official and public expression in Paris. 

On another visit home he had married a young peasant 
girl, Catherine Lemaire, and as children came to them fast, 
he was compelled to struggle, at times desperately, for the 
barest necessities of life. The work which he was compelled 
to do, and in doing which he gradually obtained some renown, 
was work of necessity rather than of his choice. He painted 
much in the nude and did work both in paint and pastel of 
a mythological and classical sort such as he or his friends 
could sell at some price to the dealers. 

Though Millet was essentially a countryfied young man, 
shy in disposition, hesitating in speech and awkward in man- 
ner, he had a personality that was in many respects attrac- 
tive, and a fine depth of character that had but to be known to 
be admired; so that in the atelier of Delaroche and among 
the artists of Paris he made warm friends, and kept them; 
but, in the language of Robert Louis Stevenson, "without 
capitulation." Among these was the Spanish painter Dias, 
who afterwards befriended him much, and Rousseau, and 
Jacque, and finally during the latter years of his stay in 

16 



Paris, Alfred Sensier, his future biographer, his ever faith- 
ful and useful friend. By profession a lawyer, Sensier had 
been appointed to some post in the Museum of the Louvre, 
which brought him into contact with many of the painters 
of his day. He was strongly attracted to Millet, visited him 
much in his studio, loved to watch him at his work, and in 
many ways made himself liked by and exceedingly useful to 
the artist; who seems to have possessed even less of worldly 
wisdom or the money getting faculty than Burns. Sensier 
did much to promote Millet among his friends, and finally 
when one of his more characteristic pictures was exhibited 
in the Revolutionary Exhibition of 1848, the picture was pur- 
chased, largely through the influence of Sensier, by M. 
Rollin, the Minister of the Interior. Through Rollin the 
same year Millet obtained a commission from the new 
Republic for a picture; the subject to be of his own choos- 
ing, and the price to be eighteen hundred francs; of which 
sum 700 francs were paid at once. After several false starts 
Millet finally began and finished the picture now known as 
"The Haymakers;" and in April, 1849 he received the other 
instalment of eleven hundred francs for the canvas. 

During the years of his life there the distaste of Millet 
for Paris had steadily grown, and with it the longing to get 
once more into the country. This desire was shared by his 
friend Jacque; so when the eleven hundred francs was paid 
to him he hurried to Jacque, and though Millet was, as he 
seems always to have been, considerably in debt, he offered 
to lend his friend half of his wind-fall provided he would 
join him in leaving Paris. Jacque readily accepted this 
proposal and with their families they hied them away, first 
to Fontainebleau and then, after a few days, through the 
forest to the village of Barbizon; a name which they and 
their like were destined to make a household word throughout 
the artistic world. 

With Barbizon the third, final and great period in the 
life of Millet began; and the happiest too in spite of continued 
harassment by debt and poverty, and by what perhaps is 
best described by the homely phrase "poor management." 

In a little while Millet had rented the curious cottage in 
which the next twenty-five years of his life were passed, in 
which he died and which may still be seen in something of 
the same condition in which he left it, in the quaint French 
hamlet just beyond the great forest of Fontainebleau. Two 
rooms eight feet high and twelve feet square accommodated 
himself, his wife and growing family; made habitable, cheer- 

17 



ful and homely by the wise and devoted wife. Then came 
upon a somewhat lower level a stable room with a door and 
a single window, used by Millet for the next five or six years 
as his studio. Along the side of this humble dwelling was 
a rather narrow paved court, enclosed by a wall and in this 
court stood a well as it is today; and back of the house was 
a small orchard and beyond was the meadow, skirting the 
forest. This scene appeared in many of Millet's subsequent 
pictures, and may be seen in "La Becque;" than which he 
seldom painted a dearer or more characteristic one. 

Soon after his removal to Barbizon Millet wrote a letter 
to Sensier, a part of which reveals the artist in a way that 
the world has learned to recognize as near the truth about 
him. He tells of three pictures he is about to send his friend 
for sale, of which he gives the titles as: A Woman Crush- 
ing Flax, A Peasant and his Wife Going to Work in the 
Fields, and Gatherers of Wood in the Forest, and he says: 

"As you will see by the titles of the pictures there are 
neither nude women nor mythological subjects among them. 
I mean to devote myself to other subjects, not that I hold 
that sort of thing to be forbidden but that I do not wish to 
feel % myself compelled to paint them." 

"But to tell the truth peasant subjects suit my nature 
best; for I must confess, at the risk of your taking me to be 
a Socialist, that the human side is what touches me most in 
art; and that, could I only do what I like, or at least attempt 
to do it, I would paint nothing that was not the result of 
an impression directly received from nature, whether in land- 
scape or in figures. The joyous side never shows itself to 
me. I know not if it exists, but I have not seen it. The 
greatest thing I know is the calm, the silence which are so 
delicious both in the forest and in the cultivated fields. 
Whether the soil is good for culture or not you will confess 
that it always gives you a very dreamy sensation and that the 
dream is a sad one, although very delicious. You are sitting 
under a tree enjoying all the comfort and quiet which it is 
possible to find in this life, when suddenly you see a poor 
creature loaded with a heavy fagot coming up the narrow 
path opposite. The unexpected and striking way in which 
this figure appears before your eyes reminds you instantly 
of the sad fate of humanity — weariness." 

"In cultivated land, or in places where the ground is 
barren, you see people digging or hoeing and from time to 
time one raises himself and 'stretches his back,' as they call 
it, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand, for 'Thou 
shalt eat bread in the sweat of thy brow.' " 

18 



The words are the words of Millet but the voice certainly 
resembles the voice of Burns: bringing to mind "Man was 
made to Mourn:" 

"When age and want, Oh! ill-matched pair, 
Show man was made to mourn." 

And such poems as "Despondency," "Winter, a Dirge," 
and even such homely ones as "The Farmer's Address to his 
Old Mare" "The Cottar's Saturday Night," and others in 
the same 'vein. But, while it is true that there was in the 
artistic temperament of both Millet and Burns a tone, if not 
sad certainly serious; it is not true of either that— "the joyous 
side never shows itself" to them. Many of Burns' poems and 
songs are exceeding humorous, some full of fun; and where 
can be found a picture more delightfully joyous than Millet's 
"Springtime," gay with blossoms and sunshine, which hangs 
beside "The Gleaners" in the Louvre. 

Nevertheless it is obviously true that the appeal made by 
nature human-nature, the human side of life closest to nature, 
was the strongest appeal that could be made to the artistic 
temperament of both men, the one to which each yielded most 
readily and with the most memorable artistic results. 

And so at Barbizon Millet, the artist, came into his own, 
and proceeded to exemplify how "essential it is to use the 
commonplace to express the sublime:" as in The Sower The 
Gleaners, The Water Carrier, The Flight of Birds, The Man 
with the Hoe, The Sheperdess, as she knits in the twilight 
The Angelus and in many other world-famous canvases. And 
it is significant that these great pictures were, many of them, 
a growth of years. The first sketch of The Sower was made 
long before he finally left Greville, and repeated with added 
and ever added power and significance in his portfolio, until 
it grew to fullness of stature, as the world knows it now. So 
with The Gleaners: first came a sketch of the woman under 
the green handkerchief (the "marmotte" of the Norman peas- 
ant) to the left of the group, leaning down, her worn hand 
and blunt fingers outstretched to reach the stalk of wheat 
and her left arm crossed over her weary back. Then followed 
from time to time other sketches, first of the second woman 
in the red marmotte; and finally the third figure, standing 
bent and weary but ready to stoop again. Even in the earlier 
sketches the wide stubble with the growing stacks appear, 
and gradually there came into the picture the other workers, 
the loaded wagon and the farmer on his horse over-seeing the 
work. The whole scene of the completed picture, perhaps 

19 



Millet's best, can yet be seen at any harvest time at Barbizon; 
for the wide plain still stretches away from the trees and 
walls of the village that close the background of the paint- 
ing, the wheat is still stacked upon the same spot and the 
gleaners still follow the harvesters as of old. 

With all such scenes of rural life, with the sowing and 
the reaping, with the fields and their workers, with the toil 
by which a man and the world may live, Millet and Burns 
were intimately familiar: 

"The thresher's weary flingin-tree 

The lee-lang day had tired me" wrote Burns in 
"The Vision." 

From their own experiences they knew the secrets of 
the poor; the pathos and the poetry of their eternal struggle. 
Each apprehended the relationship between the acts and 
scenes of the daily life of the lowly men and women about 
him and the highest art. Each of them lived in near compan- 
ionship with these men and women and recognized the value, 
dignity and integrity of a life lived worthily amid surround- 
ings however humble. Each too knew something of the life 
and people of another social scale, had "dinnered wi' a Lord," 
and each profoundly, almost militantly, realized how unes- 
sential was social rank as compared to individual character; 
that indeed: 

"The rank is but the guinea's stamp, 
The man's the gowd for all that." 

However commonplace these truths may seem now we 
should realize that they were well night revolutionary an 
hundred years ago. "At the risk of your taking me for a 
Socialist," Millet wrote to Sensier; and when the next year 
"The Sower" was exhibited: that strong, tragic, heroic, typi- 
cal figure, striding over the plowed and harrowed soil, fling- 
ing abroad the seed of a new harvest on the earth: the 
individual man, back of all human life; the profound sensa- 
tion it created was political as well as artistic. It had in- 
deed something of the same social significance as had "The 
Cottar's Saturday Night," or "A Man's a Man for a' that." 

It was Gambetta, the most popular statesman of republi- 
can France, an agnostic, who wrote of The Angelus: "That 
master-piece, in which two peasants, bathed in the pale rays 
of the setting sun, bow their heads, full of mystical emotion 
at the clear sound of the bell ringing for evening prayer, 
compels us to acknowledge the still powerful influence of 
the religious tradition on the rural population. You feel that 

20 



the artist is not merely a painter but that, living ardently 
amid the passions and the problems of the age, he has his 
share and plays his part in them. The citizen is one with the 
artist, and in this grand and noble picture he gives us a great 
lesson of social and political morality." 

For more than twenty years Millet lived in this quaint 
out-of-the-way village of Barbizon, which became a Mecca 
for the world's artistic people, one of the national shrines 
of France, and gave it's name to the artistic renaissance of 
France. At his death the tardy nation rose to do him honor 
and to proclaim him one of, if not her greatest modern 
master. His paintings, pastels, etchings and drawings are 
scattered among the great galleries, public and private, of 
the world; their value enhanced literally more than a thous- 
and fold since his death; so that a proof of his early etchings, 
such as brought ten cents when printed, now sells for forty 
and fifty pounds sterling. The Angelus, for which he re- 
ceived twenty-five hundred francs, sold for five hundred and 
fifty-three thousand, not very long after his death, at one of 
the most remarkable public sales of pictures that ever took 
place; was subsequently purchased by M. Chouchard for some 
eight hundred thousand francs, and now with his splendid 
collection rests in the Louvre. 

And the Burns cottage at Ayr is visited annually, in peace- 
ful times, by tens of thousands from all the ends of the earth. 
And the grave in St. Michael's church-yard at Dumfries, 
beside which Wordsworth stood and wrote, ever so long 
ago: 

"Through busiest street in lonliest glen 

Are felt the flashes of his pen. 
He rules 'mid winter snows, and when 

Bees fill their hives, 
Deep in the general heart of men 

His power survives." 

The Kilmarnock edition, in its light blue boards, pub- 
lished by subscription at eight pence, selling recently for four 
thousand dollars. More editions of Burns since his death 
than of any other book, so it is said, save the Bible. More 
statutes of him in more cities than of any other man that 
ever lived. Over two hundred "Burns Clubs," scattered 
through all the English speaking world, yet federated, just 
to honor his name and memory. A magazine, ably edited, 
devoted solely to his cult. 

Such wide-spread fame must have it's roots deep in 
congenial soil. Time does not lightly nor mistakenly bestow 

21 



such guerdon of praise, homage and affection as she has given 
Robert Burns and Jean Francois Millet. Great artists both, 
each in his way unique; and prophets too, interpreters not 
only of new artistic but of new social ideals. Their pictures 
and verses are still active, living forces among men; and will 
continue to be until the day come, whose coming they cer- 
tainly have promoted: 

"That come it may, as come it will for a' that, 
That man to man, the world o'er, 
Shall brothers be for a' that." 

Neither of these seers for a moment believed that Nature, 
whatever her seeming, as Tennyson suggests, is indeed "care- 
less of the single life." Each as artist did much to hearten 
men, for each in his own way dignified, yes, glorified the 
common life of men and women. Each teaches us, with a 
passion and artistic power which few indeed have equalled, 
to see and feel and sympathize with the lowly, obscure and 
poor, the hewer of wood, the sower of seed, the gleaner of 
the harvest, the cotter by his hearth; to apprehend the worth 
and the significance of the individual life. 



The Melody of Burns 

The first reviewers of Burns gave the plowman poet of 
Ayr credit for talent, but criticised unfavorably his use of 
the Scotch dialect. They said that his fame could not become 
more than local because readers, other than the Scotch, could 
not appreciate many of the words and phrases. They were 
badly mistaken. The poems of Burns which are the most 
loved and most quoted today are those in which Scotch words 
and Scotch spelling are frequent. There is natural melody 
in the Scotch dialect. This gives to the sentiment of Burns 
poems, when read aloud, added expression. 

William Vincent Byars, the linguist, who has delved 
deeply into the philosophy of music, or melody, in spoken 
languages, and who is recognized as international authority 
on this subject, has pointed out the comparative strength of 
this quality of melody in the dialect as used by Burns and 
has shown how the poems of Burns gain thereby. He 
illustrated this for the Burns Club of St. Louis by the para- 
phrase in Lowland Scotch of one of the most familiar Psalms. 



22 



Juist for Burns' Sake 

By W. Hunter 

of Kilbowie Jolley Beggars Burns Club 

Read by Frederick W. Lehmann at the meeting of the Burns Club 

of St. Louis, January 25, 1917 

When Januar' winds blaw cauld and keen, 
And frost and snaw aft deck the scene, 
A Scotchman's prood to meet a frien', 
Juist for Burns' sake. 

Big heaped plates of hamely fare, 
Wi' halesome haggis here and there — 
A dish that noo is something rare, 
Juist for Burns' sake. 

And syne the whisky's haunded roon, 
Wi' stops o' ale to wash it doon, 
Their cares and sorrows a' to droon, 
Juist for Burns' sake. 

Wi' stamacks fu', and hearts content, 
Ilk mind becomes on pleeasure bent, 
The while some chiel that statins weel kent, 
Juist for Burns' sake. 

That glorious Immortal toast, 
That mak's the greatest Scotchman boast, 
He gies in language richly glossed, 
Juist for Burns' sake. 

'Mang muckle glee the glesses clink, 
And ere ye could get time to blink, 
They rise and hae anither drink, 
Juist for Burns' sake. 

Noo, see them grip each ither's haun, 
While twa or three can hardly staun; 
They've taen ower much a' whit was gaun, 
Juist for Burns' sake. 

"There was a lad was born in Kyle," 
Is sung in sic a jovial style, 
Ye'd hear it, aye, a hauf a mile, 
Juist for Burns' sake. 
23 



Nane o' your low, saft, wheedlin tunes, 
Aft sang by lang haired German loons, 
But yin that fills your briest wi' stouns, 
Juist for Burns' sake. 

And noo they tak' their sates yince mair, 
Whilst no a bosom hauds a care, 
But a' are fixed to do and dare, 
Juist for Burns' sake. 

The nicht is spent wi' joke and sang, 
The time flees merrily alang, 
Unheeded by the jovial thrang, 
Juist for Burns' sake. 

But time brings a' thing to an end, 
The sweetest joy that e'er was kenned, 
Is faur ower short a time to spend, 
Juist for Burns' sake. 

When "Auld Lang Syne" is sung they pairt, 
And a' tak aff their separate airt, 
Resolved to meet again if spairt, 
Juist for Burns' sake. 



The Twenty-third Psalm 

A Paraphrase in Lowland Scotch 

By William Vincent Byars 
Kirkwood, Mo., October, 1916 

(1) The Lord himsel, he leads me. I dree nae need. 
(2) In pasturs green he feeds me; by pools sae clear he 
lets me rest. (3) My sicknen saul he qwickens; the way 
I tak, my ain best way, he gars me gae for his name's sake. 
(4) As noo I grope the dead-mirk thru', I hope an' dinna 
fear; yersel, my Gawd, are near, an' ye hae led the way; 
your stock and rod sail be my stay. (5) My buird before 
my faes ye spread; wi' oyle o' joy ye drook my head; my 
bicker ye fill fu'. (6) Sae truth an' gude gree hansell me, 
an' mercy too my last days thru; and at lang last, when 
earth's nae use, in Gawd's fair hus, Ise dwell forevir mair. 



Note: "Broad Scotch" vowels still have much of the same 
quantity which developed melody in Hebrew as a spoken 
language in the time of David. With the 23d Psalm, compare 
the 131st, 128th, 127th, 126th. 90th, 42d and 19th. 



24 



Burns and the Commonplace 

From "Thoughts of a Toiler" by W. Hunter 

Read by Frederick W. Lehmann at the meeting of the Burns Club 
of St. Louis, January 25, 1917 

VX7HATEVER else contributes to our growing estimation 
of Robert Burns, whether it be his outspoken con- 
demnation of hypocritical action or his inimitable lays of 
love, there exists no dubiety as to the real source of his 
popularity. The most superficial observer cannot fail to 
notice that the secret of his power breathes itself out in his 
rapturous expression on the simpler things of life. Whilst 
other gifted children of the Muse have floated on the wings 
of inspiration far up and beyond the trivialities of earthly 
existence, and wandered in a fairyland of rich imagination 
and fancy, the cotter of Ayrshire confined himself to a lowlier 
range of vision, which included all that had a bearing on the 
lives of struggling humanity. He never sought to withdraw 
his gaze from the scenes he witnessed around him, but on the 
contrary actually stopped to apply his transforming touch 
to the hitherto despised and unnoticed creations of Nature. 

No form of life, either plant or animal, was too insignifi- 
cant to merit the breath of his genius. In this respect he 
proved himself more true to nature than any poet who ever 
sang. It requires no great stretch of imagination to feel that 
within the soul of Robert Burns there existed a holy alliance 
between a tender sensitiveness and a reverent love for the 
humblest and most unassuming of earthly things. Who 
beside him ever dreamt of giving utterance to such divine 
eloquence on so common and unheeded an object as the "wee, 
modest crimson-tipper flower?" To no one else but him did 
the daisy appeal successfully for recognition. Its fate had 
always been to meet with nothing but an occasional passing 
glance, and to be ruthlessly trampled underfoot; to be 
esteemed but the plaything of children, and of no value what- 
ever to men and women fighting the battle of existence. But 
to Burns the handiwork of the Divine was as beautifully 
expressed and as apparent in the simple beauty of this tiny 
flower of the field as in the most stupendous and awe-inspir- 
ing of his works. 

How faithfully he has described the "early humble birth" 
of the "bonny gem," and told how "cheerfully it glinted forth 

25 



amid the storm!" And with what kindly grace he spoke 
of its unsheltered situation: 

"The flaunting flowers our gardens yield 
High sheltering woods and wa's maun shield, 
But thou, beneath the random bield 

O' clod or stane, 
Adorns the histie stibble-field 

Unseen, alane." 

Then from the manner of its untimely death he drew the 
melancholy moral of such a similar fate overtaking the "art- 
less maid" or the "simple bard." 

Again, our poet became inspired on the notable occasion 
when his servant Blane so far forgot himself as to set out 
to kill the "wee, sleekit, courin', tim'rous beastie," which had 
been so unceremoniously turned out of its "wee bit housie." 
How freely his sympathy ran out to the startled "mousie" 
whom he designated as his "poor earth-born companion and 
fellow-mortal." His poetic utterance glorified the simple 
theme of his musing, and therein Burns accomplished the real 
mission of his genius in directing the sympathy of men into 
the same channel as his own. In so doing he served the 
double purpose of attracting human interest to the smaller and 
less understood affairs of life, and also endearing himself 
to the toiling masses of his countrymen. And like a. true 
poet he utilized the occasion to give expression to a truism 
brought home to us with unerring certainty: 

"The best-laid schemes o' mice and men 
Gang aft a-gley, 
And lea'e us nought but grief and pain 
For promised joy." 

The poet gave way to a still more remarkable outburst 
of feeling at the sight of the wounded hare, which managed 
to "hirple" past him after being shot by a neighbor of his 
own. In a fit of anger he went so far as to threaten to throw 
Thomson into the burn. He cursed the "barbrous act" which 
brought the career of the swift-footed "wanderer of the wood 
and field" to such a painful end. 

Such leal-hearted sympathy with the distressed and 
suffering in the humbler spheres of life betokened the 
presence of intense interest in the lives of the homely and 
hardy peasantry with whom he was most closely associated. 
The heart which could feel a pang of pity for the misery and 
wretchedness of the meaner animal creation was bound to 

26 



give fitting response to the yearnings of the oppressed human 
family. And so it proved. Burns entered fully into the mode 
and manner of their living, cast a halo of brightness around 
their rustic joys and pleasures, and brought into bold relief 
the hardships and privations of their lives. 

Not only so, but through the exertion of his powerful 
genius and personality he raised the people to their proper 
level and placed them on an equal social footing with the 
peer and the prince. He recognized neither rank nor posi- 
tion, class nor distinction: 

"The rank is but the guinea stamp, 
The man's the gowd for a' that." 

Thus in the grandest possible sense Burns glorified the 
commonplace as exemplified in the lower forms of creation 
and in the lowly lives of the Scottish peasantry. His greater 
productions "Tarn o' Shanter," "The Cotter's Saturday 
Night," and "Hallowe'en," are epitomes of the national life 
and character portraying on the one hand the saintly devo- 
tion, and on the other the superstitious spirit which pervaded 
the lives of the people. His touch transfigured the hitherto 
dull and obscure environment in which they lived and died. 
Fresh beauties were discovered in the life of the nation. The 
despised and down-trodden toilers of the byre and the hay- 
field were suddenly found to possess the truest dignity of 
manhood and all the grace and charm of feminine witchery. 
The revelation ennobled the class from which the poet 
sprang. In return they have showered upon him the wealth 
of their adoration, and today, after a lapse of a century and 
a half from the date of his birth, he finds an immortal abiding 
place, enshrined in the hearts of the people. 

For ages Nature sought a voice 

To make the soul of man rejoice; 

To lure him back to taste the springs 

Of purest joy in simple things. 

At length she found a son of toil, 

"Oor Rabbie," tiller of the soil, 

At once she set his heart on fire, 

Then smiled when he took up his lyre, 

Full well she knew his song sublime 

Would vibrate till the end of time. 

And year by year the world acclaim 

His matchless worth and deathless fame. 



The Muse of Burns 

By Irvin Mattick 
January 25, 1917 

'Twas winter, and the fields of Ayr 

Like painted seas rolled still and bare, 

And from the hills the boreal wrath 

Made eddies in the snowy path 

Where all the milkwhite hawthorn slept, 

Where all the tiny rivers crept, 

Or parent streams in anger tore 

Along their ice-bound, jagged shore! 

Upon the patient, pregnant dell 

Snowflakes like spirit petals fell, 

Clothing the naked shrubs and trees 

In robes of spectral tapestries; 

When in the chariot of the storm 

There rode a lustrous spirit form, 

Bearing a faint song's magic strain 

In all the wonder of its train! 

The vision was no Attic shape, 

Wearing a huge decorous cape, 

But seemed some Naiad of the air 

With graceful arms and bosom bare; 

Who stepped with pretty twinkling feet, 

Who smiled with amorous kindness sweet, 

Whose glowing eye betrayed the mind 

That loved the whole of humankind! 

Above an honest plowman's hut, 

Whose dearest wealth was one pure cot, 

The muse of Scotland's matchless song 

'Twixt life and death despairing hung: 

The wind now ceased its weary drone, 

Through drifting clouds the starlight shone, 

And o'er the frozen field and hill 

The winter world grew deathly still: 

When suddenly an infant's cry 

Rose to the spirit maid on high, 

Who gathered in Scotland's noblest hour 

The ebbing vestige of her power, 

And dropped from heaven with graceful turns 

Into the heart of Robert Burns! 



2S 



O Burns, I wonder if you knew 
That God a task had given you, 
When into your warm human heart 
He cast Truth's sharp poetic dart; 
That stung your spirit into song, 
That made you suffer woe and wrong, 
That made you laugh and weep and jest 
Until your over-flowing breast 
Poured all its pity and its mirth 
Upon the great and humble of the earth. 
Ah, when the fair dame Poesy, 
Among her sisters set you free, 
She never left you quite alone, 
But stayed, a careless chaperone: 
Perhaps she grew so fond of how 
You praised each lassie's bonnie brow, 
That she preferred to let you rove 
Unfettered through the realms of love! 

She must have loved you for the way 

You healed the plight of Duncan Gray, 

And when you stopped between your plowing, 

Great glory on a mouse bestowing". 

She must have looked with moistened eye 

Upon your kindred misery. 

When for the rights of love and hate 

The Twa Dogs held their high debate, 

Perhaps she yearned to taste the change 

Of living in a lower range. 

And when upon that glorious morn 

The diadem of tales was born, 

Were you the one who bowed and said 

That pleasures were like poppies spread? 

Were you the one who took his hand 

And led him to the Nith's green strand, 

Within whose waters he could read 

The racing mettle of Meg's speed? 

And when beside the new-mown stack 

He lounged upon a weary back, 

And gazed at that pure lingering star, 

Did you transport his soul afar, 

Into those realms of silence, where 

He brooded oft with miser care? 

* * * * * * 

You were the truest friend he had: 
Whether his soul was bright or sad, — 
You came with gentle hands and pressed 

29 



The bursting trouble from his breast, — 
In sober moments and in wild, 
You were the guardian of this child; 
You urged him to plunge deep into folly, 
But wound the green immortal holly 
Around his head to pay the cost 
Of what his waning life had lost. 

And when he came with footsteps slow, 
And life's warm lamp was flickering low- 
You were the one who took his pen, 
And led him back to his God again, — 
Laid him in rest, to sleep serene 
With his Highland Mary and Faithful Jean! 



Ben Blewett • 
1856-1917 

By George J. Tansey 
Between the above dates, what? 

Sixteen years of boyhood in a home surrounded by lov- 
ing care and gentle, up-building influences; four years of 
intensive study in Washington University and nearly forty- 
one years of service as teacher and director of education in 
the public schools of St. Louis. 

In 1876 Ben Blewett graduated from Washington Univer- 
sity, having during the four years of his college course main- 
tained himself, and paid for his tuition by his own labors. 

At graduation he was at once tendered a position as 
Superintendent of the Cote Brilliante High School. Teaching 
was his chosen profession and his worth was speedily recog- 
nized. Steady advancement through the recognition of his 
capacities, enthusiasm and sincerity of purpose carried him 
as Principal of various schools in St. Louis from the extreme 
limits of the city on the West, then to the North, then to the 
South and later to the central section of the city, again to the 
middle W T est, and finally to the position of Superintendent of 
all the schools of our city. 

When a Committee from the Board of Education, seek- 
ing for a man to be placed in charge of our educational 
system, visited noted educators and educational institutions 

30 



throughout the country they were told with unanimity: 
"Return to St. Louis. The man you seek (Ben Blewett) is 
at your hand; better qualified for this work than any that we 
could name." 

He was ever guided by the highest ideals and might well 
have taken for his motto, "There shall be no compromise with 
error." He was deeply religious, but without religiosity. In 
his dealings with teacher and pupil he was ever gentle, for 
gentleness was the basic portion of his composition: but 
when firmness was demanded he could be firm without being 
harsh. 

The death summons came, as he would like to have had 
it come, while he was in the performance of a public duty, 
delivering an address on "Constructive Patriotism" at Wash- 
ington. His last breath was given in the service of his 
profession and to his country. 

We, of the Burns Club, who knew him in the delightful 
intimacy of our meetings, as man, teacher and public spirited 
citizen, had full opportunity in those off-guard moments, 
when a man best shows himself, to realize the kindliness of 
his nature, the sweetness of his disposition, the generosity 
of his heart and his powers as a man. 

The record of his career will be an inspiration to the 
teachers who follow him, and his benefaction a substantial 
asset for all time to the teaching corps of the St. Louis 
Public Schools. Though dead, his spirit shall live, and we, 
his intimate friends, will cherish the recollection of that 
friendship and rejoice that we knew him in the fullness of 
his powers and feel that this world is a better place for his 
having lived. 

"His life was gentle and the elements 
So mixed in him that Nature might stand up, 
And say to all the world: this was a man." 



31 



1916 

HpHOMAS AUGUSTINE DALY of Philadelphia, was the 
guest of honor at Burns Night of 1916. Mr. Daly's visit 
to St. Louis to participate in the annual meeting of the Burns 
Club was brought about by his personal friends, William 
Marion Reedy and Frederick W. Lehmann, both members 
of the club. Of Mr. Daly, Mr. Reedy said: 

"His verses in 'dago' dialect portray with tenderness and 
humor the aspects of life as it appears and appeals to Ameri- 
cans of Italian origin. His poetical interpretations of the 
spirit of the Irish in America are of like charm. His child 
verse is of as rare quality as that of Father Tabb or Robert 
Louis Stevenson. In the Lyric Year competition some years 
ago for the prize for the best poem of the twelve month, his 
lines "To a Thrush" received the second award, the first 
going to Orrick Johns, son of one of our club members, who 
read a fine poem on Burns at a former celebration. Mr. 
Daly's poems have been published in three volumes, entitled 
respectively 'Carmina,' 'Canzoni, and 'Madrigali.' " 

Mr. Daly read a charming narrative in verse written for 
the occasion, "The Birth of Tarn o' Shanter." Members hailed 
this as a most valuable contribution to their next Burns 
Nights book. "The Birth of Tarn o' Shanter" was printed 
and sent to Burns Clubs throughout the world. 

"Lines to Robert Burns," dedicated to the Burns Club 
of St. Louis by Irvin Mattick, the St. Louis poet, were read. 
A letter from James Whitcomb Riley made pleasant acknowl- 
edgment to President Bixby of one of the Burns Club books. 
It referred to Mr. Riley's own poem on Burns, speaking of 
Burns as his most loved poet, in these words: 

"Sweet singer that I lo'e the maist 

any sin wi eager haste, 

1 smacket bairn lips ower the taste 

hinnied sang. 

1 hail thee though a blessed ghaist 
In Heaven lang. 

Wi brimman lip and laughin' ee 
Thou shookest even grief wi' glee, 
Yet had nae niggart sympathy 
Where sorrow bowld, 
But gavest a thy tears as free 
As a thy Gowd." 

32 



The Birth O' Tarn O'Shanter 

By Thomas Augustine Daly 

of Philadelphia 

Written for the Burns Club of St. Louis and read by the author 

at the meeting January 25, 1916 

TO a friendly challenge from Captain Grose we are indebted 
for this admirable masterpiece. Burns having entreated 
him to make honorable mention of Alloway Kirk in his 
Antiquities of Scotland, he promised compliance with the re- 
quest upon one condition, namely, that the poet should supply 
him with a metrical witch story, as an accompaniment to the 
engraving 1 . Mrs. Burns it was who related to Kromek the 
marvelous rapidity with which this poem was produced. Ac- 
cording to her, it was the work of a single day — one account 
even stating that it was composed between breakfast and 
dinner. 

As Alexander Smith put it, with an exultant chuckle, the 
best day's work ever done in Scotland, since Bruce won Ban- 
nockburn. Burns, during the early part of that memorable day, 
had passed the time alone in pacing his favorite walk upon the 
river bank. Thither in the afternoon he was followed by his 
"bonnie Jean" and some of their children. Finding that he was 
"crooning to himself," and fearing lest their presence might be 
an interruption, his considerate wife loitered some little dis- 
tance behind among the bloom and heather with her brood of 
young ones. There her attention was caught by the poet's 
impassioned gesticulations. She could hear him repeating 
aloud, while the tears ran down his face: "Now, Tarn! O, Tarn! 
had they been queans." Toward evening, when the storm of 
composition had fairly run out, Burns, we are told by M'Diar- 
mid, committed the verses to writing upon the top of a sod 
dyke, overhanging the river; and directly they were completed 
rushed indoors to read them aloud by the fireside in a tone 
of rapturous exultation. 

— Rev. Dr. J. Loughran Scott, in the Alloway Edition of Burns* 
Works. 

How broke the east upon that day, 

In fire and blood or ashes gray? 

And did a rich or niggard boon 

Of sunlight gild the Nith at noon? 

Who knows or cares? For on that morning, 

When Tarn o'Shanter, without warning, 

Came gloriously down to earth, 

The river, singing at his birth, 

Wore on its face a mystic light; 

For in that moment reached its height 

The lyric fire, the zenith flare 

From out the heart of Burns of Ayr! 

33 



O! little Nith! O! happy river 

You shall not lose that gleam forever; 

Your waves, whatever moods betide them, 

Shall sing of him who walked beside them 

And from his great, heart wove a story 

That was the crown upon his glory. 

And on that morning when he came 

With frenzied eye and cheek aflame 

To feast his soul upon the food 

That poets find in solitude, 

What was the charm you held him with, 

O! helpful little river Nith? 

Ah, well I know the way you did it! 

I shall not mince nor gloss the credit, 

But, auditing the dim dead past, 

Shall here set down your score at last. 

To you, that morning (Who shall care 

If skies above were dull or fair?) 

The poet, seeking comfort, brought 

His fecund fancy, big with thought. 

Beside your bonnie banks he walked, 

And ever as he went he talked 

The quaint, blithe things that thronged his brain 

And conned them o'er and o'er again; 

And presently the liquid laughter 

Of pleasant waters gurgled after, 

And, as a voice by harp attended, 

With borrowed beauty grows more splendid, 

So waxed the poet's budding song 

Where light your ripples leaped along. 

You smiled and danced and made your measures 

To match his song of ale-house pleasures, 

Where Tarn and cronies came to mingle 

Beside their comfortable ingle; 

But when the "reaming swats" came thicker 

And Robin's tongue, that sang of liquor, 

Grew overload and full of yearning, 

No doubt you set your rapids churning, 

To draw his thoughts from off the "nappy" 

And keep him singing, blithe and happy. 

Then, when he pushed those joys aside 
And sallied forth with Tarn to ride, 
(For well you know that Tarn o'Shanter 
Was not alone upon that canter) 
How well again his mood was fellowed! 
Among your rocks the thunder bellowed; 
34 



Your spray "upon the light breeze passed 

For "rattlin' showers upon the blast"; 

You made the "Doon pour all his floods," 

The "doubling storm roar through the woods"; 

And somewhere in your shadows lurk 

The dancers in the ruined kirk. 

But when that dance grew wild and furious 

And Tarn, with watching, much too curious; 

An Robbin, prattling of the "queans, 

A' plump and strapping in their teens," 

Seemed bent on lingering overlong, 

I like to think that then the song 

In all your rippling waves you stilled, 

As by the breath of winter chilled, 

That Robin, in the pause, might hear 

His "bonnie Jean" and children near; 

And draw his thoughts from "sarks o' flannel" 

And back into the proper channel. 

Then with your song and liquid laughter 
You rose again to follow after, 
With O! what sympathetic feeling, 
Where faithful Meg, the mare, goes reeling 
Across the bridge that spans the flood, 
By all the ghostly crew pursued, 
And carries off her master, hale, . 
But leaves behind her own grey tail. 

And when the day was done you knew 
The poet's exaltation, too; 
'Twas yours at fall of dusk to share 
The calm that soothed the bard of Ayr, 
And through the night, O happy stream! 
You were a music in his dream. 
There, musing by some mossy stone, 
Perhaps, ah, yes, you must have known 
That though again upon your shore 
The poet still would walk, no more 
Would Time bring round to you the bliss 
Of any day to match with this — 
The very cap-sheaf on the past, 
The greatest labor and the last. 

Oh! in the fire of that one day 
How many years were burned away? 
And in the torrents of his tears 
Were lost how many unborn years? 
For this man took life's cup and laughed 
35 



A 



And strove to drain it at a draught. 

What tragedy was in this mirth, 

O! river, singing at its birth? 

What holocaust was in the light 

With which your morning face was bright? 

O! little Nith! O! happy river, 
You shall not lose that gleam forever; 
Your waves, whatever moods betide them, 
Shall sing of him who walked beside them 
And from his great heart wove a story 
That was the crown upon his glory! 



To Henry King 

T the annual dinner of the Burns Club of St. Louis in 
1914, the address of the evening was by Captain Henry 
King, editor of the Globe-Democrat. Two years later a chair 
at the long table in the Burns Club room was vacant. Captain 
King was one of the original promoters of the movement 
which created the replica of the Burns Cottage on the 
World's Fair grounds in 1904. Captain King presided most 
happily over the sessions of the World's Press Parliament, 
organized by Walter Williams, the first assemblage of the 
kind in the history of the world's journalism, which was 
followed by the distinct recognition of the newspaper pro- 
fession in the educational institutions of the United States. 
Captain King became one of the organizers of the Burns 
Club of St. Louis and a regular participant in the Burns 
Nights to honor the anniversary of the poet's birth. At the 
meeting in 1916, the members stood in silence as President 
Bixby announced the passing of Captain King. This tribute 
was offered by Walter B. Stevens and was adopted by the 
club: 

Several years ago Henry King wrote this of his profes- 
sion: 

"But over and above all considerations of financial profit 
and of attractive employment, there is the opportunity, which 
is also an obligation, to promote truth and justice, to expose 
fraud and crime, to favor honest and decent government, to 
stand for education, morality, patriotism and all the whole- 
some influences of society. That is where the profession of 
journalism reaches the summit of its philosophy and its dis- 
tinction and demonstrates that Shakespeare was never wiser 
than when he wrote: 

36 



"'Heaven doth with us as we with torches do, 
Not light them for themselves; but if our 
Virtues did not go forth of us t'were all alike 
As if we had them not.' " 

Henry King lived these, his ideals of his profession, 
throughout his allotted years. 

His philosophy of life in general might be summed up 
in the bard's epitaph: 

"Reader, attend — whether thy soul 
Soars fancy's nights beyond the pole, 
Or darkling grubs this earthly hole, 

In low pursuit; 
Know prudent, cautious self-control 

Is wisdom's root." 

And when the peaceful end came, Henry King could, 
with Burns, have sung the "Song of Death": 

"Farewell, thou fair day, thou green earth, and ye skies, 

Now gay with the bright setting sun; 

Farewell loves and friendships, ye dear tender ties— 

Our race of existence is run!" 
"Thou grim king of terrors, thou life's gloomy foe! 

Go, frighten the coward and slave; 

Go teach them to tremble, fell tyrant! but know, 

No terrors hast thou for the brave." 

And we, his associates of the Burns Club of St. Louis, 
can say of Henry King, as did Burns of his friend: 

"An honest man here lies at rest 
As e'er God with his image blest! 
The friend of man, the friend of truth; 
The friend of age, and guide of youth; 
Few hearts like his, with virtue warm'd, 
Few heads with knowledge so inform'd; 
If there's another world, he lives in bliss; 
If there is none, he made the most of this." 



1915 

t>EV DR. JAMES W. LEE, the Methodist divine of inter- 
national fame, was the speaker of Burns Night of 1915. 
"Genius and Geography" gave Dr. Lee his opportunity to 
show how Burns had bestowed perpetual distinction upon his 
birthplace, upon Alloway Mill, upon the Nith and upon the 
villages, rivers and various localities which had prompted 
his muse. "When a spot has become sacred to men," said 
Dr. Lee, "it is always in the first place because a great spirit 
has dwelt there, but another feature is the way in which, in 
the making of a shrine like the birthplace of Burns, for 
instance, the physical surroundings have managed, in some 
way, to absorb the very soul of the poet; as though emana- 
tions from his spirit had been shot into the house in such a 
way as to humanize it with the flavor of Burns' personality; 
and into the fields around the house in such a way as to fill 
them with the aroma of Burns' spirit; and into the little 
river flowing near the house in such a way as to put it to 
singing with music caught from the melody of Burns' songs." 
From Burns, the speaker passed to others of the world's 
greatest to illustrate this relationship of Genius and 
Geography. 

Letters were read from two absent members, David F. 
Houston, the Secretary of Agriculture in the Cabinet of 
President Wilson, and David R. Calhoun. 

Saunders Norvell, a member of the club, sent from 
Missoula, Montana, a greeting by wire with couplets in 
Scotch humor for several members: 

"To Bixby: 

At any time I'd rather sit with you than ride, so 
Were I Royal Georgie. The Lord in Heaven reward 
ye." 
"To Douglas: 

Auld comrade dear and brother sinner, how's the 
folks about guid commer. For me my faculties 
are frozen, my dearest member nearly dozened." 

"To Blewett: 

Is there a man whose judgment clear 
Can others teach the course to steer, 
Yet runs himself life's mad career, 
Wild as a wave?" 



"To Wright: 

He sang with joy his former day. He, we weeping, 

wailed his latter times. 
But what he said it was nae play, I winna venture 
in my rhymes." 

"To Johns: 

Your news and reviews, sir, we read through and 

through, sir, 
"With little admiring and blaming. The papers are 

barren of home news or foreign. No murders or 

rapes worth the naming." 

"To Johnson: 

A man may drink and not be drunk. A man may 
fight and not be slain. 

A man may kiss a bonnie wench and, aye, be wel- 
comed back again." 

"To Crawford: 

An lastly Hanford, for yoursel' may guardian angels 

tak' a spell 
And steer you seven miles south of Hell. 
But first, before you see Heaven's glory 
May ye get monie a story, monie a lark and monie a 

drink 
And, aye, enough o' needful clink." 

"To All: 

And there's a hand my trusty frien' 
And gies a hand o' thine 
And we'll tak' a right guid willie waught 
For auld lang syne." 

SANDY NORVELL. 

A paper by Frederick W. Lehmann on "The Scotch 
According to Johnson," added greatly to the interest of this 
Burns Night of 1915. It had been delivered before the Cale- 
donian Society, but was repeated before the Burns Club at the 
request of the club. 



30 



Genius and Geography 

By Rev. Dr. James W. Lee 
January 25, 1915 

A SERIES of articles appeared in the London Times of 
last year, entitled "A Dickens' Pilgrimage," in which 
Dickens was treated as a country and was traveled through 
and explored as a tourist would make his way through 
Greece or France. The. novelist was represented as spread 
out like Missouri or Tennessee. A remarkable thing about 
this Dickens country was that not a sprig of grass or tree 
or rock or mountain or country house or mansion or hotel 
or vehicle or cow or horse or man or woman or child in it 
but was enhanced in value and in importance by all 
the wealth of the author's personality. If the geographical 
method of treating a personality such as that of Dickens 
were applied to all the great people who have ever lived, we 
would find that instead of a few countries such as we now 
know by the name of England or Germany or Egypt or 
Palestine, we would have thousands of them such as we 
know by the name of Moses, Isaiah, St. Paul, Philo Judaeus, 
Plato, Sir Walter Scott, Burns, and so on through the list 
of all those, who, by living or thinking or singing or serving, 
have lifted the places and things with which they were 
associated, from the realm of time to that of eternity. 

The publishers of Everyman's Library are now bringing 
out a series of historical geographies, in which only the 
places, cities and towns of each county are put down that 
stand out above the general deal level of human monotony, 
because of their connection with decisive battles, heroic 
deeds, literary triumphs or other extraordinary achievements. 
In these books the patches of territory on the earth's surface 
that have not been saturated with the personality of some 
great saint or artist or hero are not considered at all. 
Railroads, warehouses, vast fields of wheat, pork and beef 
plants, add in themselves alone nothing of permanent value 
to these countries, which are being mapped and geograph- 
ically described from the standpoint of historic people and 
historic deeds. The Andes would not be down in any of 
these historical geographies but for the fact that Alexander 
Von Humboldt climbed Chimborazo, one of its peaks, and 
made observations. The Taj Mahal, Shah Jehan's twenty 
million dollar tomb at Agra in India, does not occupy as 
much space as the two hundred dollar cottage in Ayr, Scot- 

40 



land, where Robert Burns was born. The County of Hamp- 
shire, England, where John Keble preached in Hursley 
twenty-five years, and where Gilbert White preached in Sel- 
bourne twenty years, and where Charles Kingsley preached 
in Eversley thirty years, is given more attention than all 
Texas, with area enough to make more than a thousand 
counties as large as Hampshire. 

The geography enhanced by the genius of Burns does 
not cover much of the earth's surface. A few little rivers 
and villages and towns and the City of Edinburgh were 
sufficiently illuminated by association with the poet to se- 
cure perpetual distinction in the geography of genius. Take 
the humble cottage in which the poet was born. It consists 
of but two small rooms, paved with flagstones, and with but 
one window of four small panes, while the thatched roof 
forms the only ceiling. It is difficult to imagine a father 
and mother and seven small children living in such a place. 
But this little house, multiplied by Burns, is of more value, 
from the standpoint of pounds, shillings and pence, than 
the Taj Mahal multiplied by Shah Jehan. About fifty 
thousand people a year visit the cottage in which Burns was 
born. Estimate what it costs for each one of these persons 
to go up from London to Ayr and return, adding what they 
pay for pictures and bric-a-brac connected with the cottage, 
and you will perhaps get a sum equal to one million five 
hundred thousand dollars. This is an annual income at five 
per cent, on thirty millions of dollars. We may say then, 
measured by the annual income it produces, Burns' cottage is 
worth thirty millions of dollars, while the Taj Mahal, that 
cost twenty millions of dollars to build, does not perhaps 
produce an income of one hundred thousand dollars. 

It is certainly not through any reasoning or calculation 
that pilgrimages are made to places made famous because 
of their relation to great men. The disposition to see the 
Scotland of Burns does not grow out of the aesthetic sense 
or the desire for trade and profit. It is simply due to one of 
those forces outside of reason, which far more than reason 
have to do with the making of man. The secret is one of 
the soul but not of the soul only. When a spot has become 
sacred to men, it is always in the first place because a great 
spirit has dwelt there, but another feature is the way in 
which, in the making of a shrine like the birthplace of Burns, 
for instance, the outside conditions, the physical surround- 
ings, have acted as a kind of reflex of his soul, as an 
absorbent of it. Such that by dwelling in the place, the poet 
saturated it with his personality, as though emanations from 

41 



his spirit had been poured into the house, into the fields 
around it, and into the little river flowing near it. One 
feels, in the region, as if there had been a subtle giving off 
of the poet's interior being, a passing of its essence into 
its immediate surroundings, a process which might be com- 
pared to the outrush of electrons from the atom, which we 
are now taught is one of the forms of radio-activity. This 
subtle reaction of mind and matter is a very remarkable 
fact. Every feeling of Burns, every aspiration, his own inner- 
most heartbeats are held and reflected by the environing 
conditions in which he spent his short life of thirty-eight 
years. As the violin, played on by a master, acquires a new 
value because his melody manages to find its way into the 
wood, so the earthly surroundings of Burns have acquired 
a value because seemingly saturated with the wonder and 
mystery of the poet's soul. His spirit continues to vibrate 
through his physical surroundings. The peculiar quality of 
his dominating personality colors the whole impression made 
upon those who visit the Scotland of the poet, by the 
scenery in the midst of which he lived. 

More tourists visit the birthplace of Burns, two miles 
southward out of Ayr on the Maybole road, than ever see 
the birthplace of any other poet or literary man who ever 
lived. The cottage was built literally of clay by the poet's 
father, on a small holding of six or seven acres, which he 
had leased as a means of adding to his livelihood as a gar- 
dener. Because Burns first saw the light in this cottage, 
and because he spent the first six years of his life under its 
thatched roof, it has come to have a larger place in the 
imagination of mankind than the palace of the Caesars. Allo- 
way Mill, a mile away, where the poet went to school, has 
a place in literature equal to that of a great university. 
When the poet was six years old, the little household moved 
over the hill to Mount Oliphant, and by so doing made that 
the most distinguished mountain in Scotland. There the next 
six years were spent. "We lived very poorly," said Burns, 
"I was a dexterous plowman for my age, and the next eldest 
to me (Gilbert) could drive the plow very well, and help me 
to thresh the corn." 

At the same time, the future poet was imbibing other 
influences. In the evenings his mother's ballads were sup- 
plemented by the stories of Jennie Wilson, an old woman 
who lived in the family, and whose astonishing store of 
tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, 
witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, 
wraiths, apparitions and the like, ceased to be provincial and 

42 



local when touched by the universal genius of Burns. He 
read the "Life of Hannibal" and the "History of Sir William 
Wallace," and thus gave them a circulation wider than they 
had ever before attained. 

In the town of Ayr itself one may still see that other 
bridge, the "Auld Brig," which owes its preservation and the 
popular fervor of 1906, which produced ten thousand pounds 
for the nurpose, to the fact that it figures in Burns' poem, 
"The Twa Briggs." The farm of Mossgiel, near Mauchline, 
secured and stocked by the poet and his brothers and sisters 
when the clouds of ruin were gathering around their father's 
head, will outlive any other farm in Great Britain, because 
it was in the fields of Mossgiel itself that the incidents 
occurred which suggested the poems, "To a Mouse," "To a 
Mountain Daisy," "Death and Dr. Hornbrook," "The Twa 
Dogs," "The Cottar's Saturday Night," and "Hallowe'en." 

In the neighborhood of this region is a little stream, 
flowing through deeply wooded banks, known as Bonnie 
Doon, which is larger, measured by the space it occupies on 
the map of literature, than the Mississippi river. Then there 
is the Alloway Kirk, not far away, that is perhaps the small- 
est church that ever filled so large a place in the thought of 
the world. No grand and storied cathedral pile in all Europe 
is better known, and to no shrine of famous Minster do 
more pilgrims journey, than to this little church immortal- 
ized by the pen of Burns. 

Like immortal ships, the spirits of great men sail the 
Ocean of Time, bearing the treasures and archives of the 
civilization which gave them birth, and also the names of 
places with which they were associated on earth. They out- 
ride the fury of all the storms, and will sail on till 

"The stars grow old, 
The sun grows cold, 
And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold." 

The nation is unfortunate beyond expression that has no 
son, with genius wide and universal enough to convey to 
the future her history. Whatever may be her wealth and 
her commercial importance, she is without a future. Babylon 
was a vast and rich empire; she was situated in the most 
fertile portion of the globe. She had a capital that eclipsed 
all others in splendor and wealth, but among her people she 
found no man amply endowed enough to understand and 
give permanent mental setting to her faith and her civiliza- 
tion. Her heartthrobs, whatever they were, got interpreted 
in no poem, explained in no philosophy, and written in no 

43 



history. Into oblivion has fallen that bejeweled and pam- 
pered life that reveled in her magnificent palaces and amid 
her far-famed hanging gardens. Over it all has settled the 
stillness of the desert and the gloom of eternal night. 

On the other hand, how secure is the Greece that flow- 
ered in her great men. She has been despoiled of her art 
treasures, her temples have fallen, the Parthenon is in ruins, 
but the two hundred years of her life, which she deposited in 
her great men, are immortal. No tooth of time, no war's 
bloody hand, no devastation of years, can take from her the 
glory which she lifted and locked in the genius of her artists, 
her statesmen and her philosophers. Plato and Aristotle still 
interpret her problems of destiny. Sophocles and Pindar still 
sing her glories, Herodotus and Thucydides still keep the 
record of her victories. Demosthenes and Aeschines 
still declare her matchless eloquence. Appelles still gives 
expression to her conceptions of form and beauty. Her 
riches were shipped to the future in the spirits of great men. 
The unfolding centuries may look in upon them and enjoy 
them, but their passage through the years cannot be 
arrested. 

The most trifling and seemingly unimportant activities 
of Burns, when multiplied by his personality, became signi- 
ficant. Not far from the Solway shore, Burns with a small 
party of revenue officers was left to watch the motions of 
an armed smuggling brig, which had got into shallow water, 
while a brother exciseman went to Dumfries for a guard of 
dragoons, and the superintendent went to Ecclefechan on a 
similar errand. While the party lay in the wet salt-marsh 
chafing at the exciseman's delay, Burns, on the hint of one 
of his men, composed and recited on the spot his well-known 
set of verses, "The Deil's awa' wi' the Exciseman," and by 
so doing put the adventure of the day down in the Geography 
of Genius. 

Directly after the flush of his success and fame as a 
great poet, he came into Nithsdale and built the farmhouse 
of Ellisland, which is still standing on the bank of the Nith, 
some six or seven miles from Dumfries. This house will 
stand forever because the object for which he built it is 
expressed in his own lines: 

"To make a happy fireside clime 
For weans and wife — 
That's the true pathos and sublime 
Of human life." 

Here in these happy days, after his marriage to Jean 
Armour, while superintending the building of the house in 

44 



Ellisland, the poet composed that most exquisite of all love 
songs, in the music of which his house and his Jean will 
float down the ages forever: 

"Of a' the airts the wind can blaw I dearly like the west, 
For there the bonnie lassie lives, the lassie I lo'e best; 
There wildwoods grow and rivers row, and many a hill 

between. 
But day and night my fancy's flight is ever wi my Jean." 

On the gable window of the house Burns built, which is 
still standing, looking south, one may still see the poet's 
handwriting. Under its roof, in these first halcyon days, he 
gave the place immortality by writing such fine things as 
"Gae fetch to me a pint o' wine," "My heart's in the Hie- 
lands," "Willie brewed a peck o' maut." 

The place is enhanced still more, because it was here, 
on the anniversary of the day on which he heard of the 
death of his early love, Mary Campbell, stretched on a mass 
of straw in the barnyard with his eyes fixed on a planet 
that shone like another moon, he composed that noblest of 
all his ballads, "To Mary in Heaven": 

"Thou lingering star with lessening ray 
That lov'st to greet the early morn, 
Again thou usher'st in the day 

My Mary from my soul was torn." 

Below the house there still may be seen the path running 
along the bank of the Nith, which was his favorite walk, and 
where, in the hours of a single day, he forged white-hot on 
the anvil of his genius, the most famous of all his master- 
pieces, "Tarn O'Shanter." He committed the verses to writ- 
ing, it was said, on the top of a turf-dyke over the water, 
and when the whole was finished came into the house and 
read them in high triumph at the fireside. Many other spots 
in this neighborhood have been made illustrious in the poet's 
verse. 

But the farming failed and his work as exciseman began 
toward the close of 1791, when Burns moved into Dumfries 
again. Here he wrote "Duncan Gray," "Tha Lee Rig," and 
"Highland Mary." 

His duties as an exciseman entailed his riding some two 
or three hundred miles every week, and in consequence the 
countryside far and near was illuminated by celestial fire, 
flaming hot from the poet's soul. At Brownhill on the Glas- 
gow road, one evening, Burns, noticing a weary soldier limp 
past the window, called him in, regaled him heartily, and 

45 



after hearing his pathetic story, enshrined it in his fine 
stanzas, "The Soldier's Return," and so gave to that soldier 
the glorious privilege of limping past that window to be 
hailed and regaled by Robert Burns throughout all time. 

The same hotel at Brownhill saw the composition con- 
cerning Bacon, the landlord, who was in the habit of inflict- 
ing his company, uninvited, rather constantly on his guests, 
and this fact Burns immortalized, as follows: 

"At Brownhill, we always get dainty good cheer, 
And plenty of Bacon each day in the year; 
We've all things that's nice, and mostly in season, 
But why always bacon? — come, give me a reason." 
Not many landlords ever found such a chance for a place 
in the sun of the literary heavens. On a tumbler belonging 
to Mrs. Bacon, Burns wrote: 

"You're welcome, Willie Stewart; 

Your're welcome, Willie Stewart; 

There's ne'er a flower that blooms in May 

That's half so welcome's thou art." 
Airs. Bacon made much ado about this damage to her prop- 
erty, till a gentleman present paid her a shilling for the 
glass. This afterwards found a place among the most valued 
relics at Abbottsford. Thus Mrs. Bacon and her husband 
will occupy places forever, in the sun of the literary heavens, 
the one inflicting his company, uninvited, on his guests, 
while the other, his wife, has been given the opportunity to 
complain throughout all ages, about the damage to her 
tumbler caused by the writing of Robert Burns. 

Among other spots in the neighborhood rendered famous 
by the presence and the muse of Burns, the most interesting 
is Lincluded College ruin, close by the town. The green 
bank of the river there was a favorite walk of the poet's, 
and he mentioned it in at least two of his compositions. By 
these walls, hoary with memories, within which lies buried 
the daughter of King Robert III, who was wife of Archibald 
the Grim, Earl of Douglas and Duke of Touraine, Burns 
composed his "Vision of Liberty": 

"As I stood by yon roofless tower 

Where wallflower scents the dewy air, 
Where the owlet mourns in her ivy bower, 
And tells the midnight moon her care. 
"By heedless chance I turned mine eyes, 
And by the moonbeams shook to see 
A stern and stalwart ghaist arise, 

Attired as minstrels wont to be." 
46 



Other pieces written at this time in this neighborhood 
were "My Nannie's awa'," and "A Man's a man for a' that." 

The convivialities of Dumfries formed a drain upon the 
health of Burns, which he could no longer bear. One tavern 
in particular, in the town, keeps splendid and disastrous 
memories of Robert Burns. The Globe, in its narrow entry 
off High Street, has changed little since he frequented it. 
His writing is still legible on several of its windows, and 
in its dark, low-roofed, wainscoted parlor is preserved the 
rough round chair in which he used to sit and keep the mirth 
flying till the small hours. But his visits to the Globe were 
made at a terrible cost. It was there he accepted an invita- 
tion to dine with friends. He remained till three in the 
morning, and on leaving the company sat down on the step 
of the tavern stable and there fell asleep. It was January 
and there was snow on the ground, and from that hour he 
felt the grasp of death upon him. Bodily pain and mental 
anxiety for the future of those dear to him made day and 
night alike a misery. 

"He erred, he sinned; and if there be 
Who, from his hapless frailties free, 
Rich in the poorer virtues, see 

His faults alone — 
To such, O Lord of Charity, 

Be mercy shown! 

"Singly he faced the bigot brood, 
The meanly wise, the feebly good; 
He pelted them with pearl, with mud; 

He fought them well — 
But ah, the stupid million stood, 
And he — he fell! 

"All bright and glorious at the start, 
'Twas his ignobly to depart, 
Slain by his own too affluent heart, 

Too generous blood; 
And blindly, having lost Life's chart, 

To meet Death's flood. 

"So closes the fantastic fray, 
The duel of the spirit and clay! 
So come bewildering disarray 

And blurring gloom, 
The irremediable day 
And final doom. 
47 



"So passes all confusedly 
As lights that hurry, shapes that flee 
About some brink we dimly see, 

The trivial, great, 
Squalid, majestic tragedy 

Of human fate. 

"Not ours to gauge the more or less, 
The will's defect, the blood's excess, 
The earthly humors that oppress 

The radiant mind, 
His greatness, not his littleness, 
Concerns mankind." 

Not only did Burns enhance every place he passed, every 
object he saw, every spot upon which he stood, but he left 
the color of his very mood upon the places associated with 
him. Perhaps the happiest and gayest and most radiant 
period of Burns' life was during the first months he spent 
in Edinburgh. No city in all Europe ever had its palaces 
and towers, its halls of justice, its sons and daughters, lifted 
before all nations in such beautiful rhythm, and assured it 
so splendid a fashion of holding its place in the realms of 
thought forever. 

"Edina! Scotia's darling seat! 

All hail thy palaces and towers, 
Where once beneath a monarch's feet 

Sat Legislation's sovereign powers! 
From marking wildly-scatter'd flowers, 

As on the banks of Ayr I stray'd, 
And singing, lone, the ling'ring hours, 

I shelter in thy honour'd shade." 

Contrast the radiant mood with which Burns illuminated 
the beautiful city of Edinburgh with the sad, depressed state 
of mind in which he came to the village of Brow, near Dum- 
fries, on the Solway shore, in the last fortnight of his life, 
to try what sea-bathing and sea-air might do for his failing 
powers. Here it was he wrote the last song he was ever to 
pen, entitled "The Fairest Maid on Devon's Banks." Here 
it was that he wrote that last letter to Thomson, his pub- 
lisher, imploring five pounds to prevent a rascal haberdasher 
putting his emaciated body into jail. This is perhaps one of 
the most pathetic letters ever written: "Brow, on the Solway 
Firth, 12th July, 1796. After all my boasted independence, 
curst necessity compels me to implore you for five pounds. 
A cruel wretch of a haberdasher, to whom I owe an account, 

48 



taking it into his head that I am dying, has commenced a 
process and will inevitably put me into jail. Do, do, for 
God's sake, send me that sum, and that by return post! For- 
give me this earnestness, but the horrors of jail have made 
me half distracted. I do not ask this gratuitously, for upon 
returning health I hereby promise and engage to furnish you 
with five pounds worth of the neatest song genius you have 
seen. I tried my hand on the poem this morning. The 
measure is so difficult that it is impossible to infuse much 
genius in the lines. They are on the other side. Forgive 
me! Forgive me!" 

"Fairest maid on Devon's banks, 
Crystal Devon! Winding Devon! 
Wilt thou lay that frown aside 
And smile as thou wert wont to do?" 

Here is a letter to his wife, from the same place, the last 
he ever wrote to her: "My dearest Love: I delayed writing 
until I could tell you what effect sea-bathing was likely to 
produce. It would be injustice to deny that it has eased my 
pains and I think has strengthened me, but my appetite is 
still extremely bad. No flesh nor fish can I swallow. Por- 
ridge and milk are the only things I can taste. I am very 
happy to hear from Miss Jessie Lewars that you are all well. 
My very best and kindest compliments to her and all the 
children. I will see you on Sunday. Your affectionate hus- 
band." 

Then we can follow the poet to that low-roofed upper 
room of the house still standing in Dumfries, whither he 
returned to die. The room is still said to contain the round 
mahogany table at which he was sitting for one of his last 
meals, when a friend asked him how he felt and was 
answered by the ominous words, "Posting fast to the grave, 
madam." 

The last scene was not far off. It was the 18th of July 
when he returned home, with difficulty able to stand upright 
and reach his own door. On the 21st of July, 1796, he died. 
Not far away, in St. Michael's kirkyard, is to be seen the 
mausoleum to which the remains of the poet were removed 
in 1815. Tens of thousands visit the shrine every year. Here 
a modern poet, William Watson, stood and afterward wrote 
those pathetic lines: 

"What woos the world to yonder shrine? 
What sacred clay, what dust divine? 
Was this some Master faultless — fine, 

In whom we praise 
The cunning of the jeweled line 

And carven phrase? 

49 



"A searcher of our source and goal, 
A reader of God's secret scroll? 
A Shakespeare, flashing o'er the whole 

Of Man's domain 
The splendor of his cloudless soul 

And perfect brain? 

"Some Keats, to Grecian gods allied, 
Clasping all beauty as his bride? 
Some Shelley, soaring dim-descried 

Above Time's throng, 
And heavenward hurling wild and wide 

His spear of song? 

"A lonely Wordsworth, from the crowd 
Half-hid in light, half-veiled in cloud? 
A sphere-born Milton cold and proud 

In hallowing dews 
Dipt, and with gorgeous ritual vowed 

Unto the Muse? 

"Nay, none of these — and little skilled 
On heavenly heights to sing and build! 
Thine, thine, O Earth, whose fields he tilled 

And thine alone, 
Was he whose fiery heart lies stilled 

'Neath yonder stone. 

"He came when poets had forgot 
How rich and strange the human lot; 
How warm the tints of Life; how hot 

Are Love and Hate; 
And what makes Truth divine, and what 
Makes Manhood great." 

Thus we are able to see what genius has to do with 
the making of geography. Concord, Mass., with its thou- 
sand inhabitants, multiplied by Emerson, Thoreau and Haw- 
thorne, occupies a larger place in the world of thought than 
Buenos Ayres multiplied by more than a million of the com- 
mon run of South American mortals. The earth would be 
only so much gravel were it not for the great people who have 
lived upon it and lifted it from the realm of matter to that 
of spirit. They tell us that it will finally be left without heat 
and cease at length to be a dwelling place for man. One 
thing is certain, the parts of it associated with the lives of 
great men and women are eternally safe. 

Through genius matter is transmuted into thought, and 
thought is immortal. Not one village or city or countryside 

50 



or field or bridge or river that Burns ever saw but will live 
forever. 

"No mystic torch through Time he bore, 
No virgin veil from Life he tore; 
His soul no bright insignia wore 

Of starry birth; 
He saw what all men see— no more— 
In heaven and earth; 

"But as, when thunder crashes nigh, 
All darkness opes one flaming eye, 
And the world leaps against the sky — 

So fiery clear 
Did the old truths that we pass by 

To him appear. 

"A dreamer of the common dreams, 
A fisher in familiar streams, 
He chased the transitory gleams 

That all pursue; 
But on his lips the eternal themes 

Again were new." 

In the direction of this line of study, we learn the secret 
of why more than a hundred thousand people go to Europe 
every year and none to South America. The Rhine and the 
Rhone are tiny brooks compared with the Amazon. The Alps, 
the Apennines and the Pyrenees combined are but hills com- 
pared to the mighty chain of the Andes. Why does Europe 
draw the people while the vaster Southern continent does 
not? It is because Europe has been idealized and lifted by 
genius out of the realm of nature into that of art. The 
Amazon is mere hugeness and bulk of matter and does 
not interest the soul because the advent of man has not yet 
given it history and converted it into art. The Avon, the 
Thames, the Cam, the Isis and even the tiny rill of Bonnie 
Doon, a million times surpasses because Shakespeare, Milton 
and Burns have made them great and started their waters 
to flowing all around the globe. No one goes to Scotland 
to see the country God made but to see the land made t)y 
Scott and Burns and Hume and John Knox. The countries 
made by the Creator are infinitely less interesting than the 
countries made by great men, or rather it is truer to say 
that the only countries which draw the people are such as 
God has made through man. 

In the realm of pure creative art are not the names 
which the poet and the novelist have given us often more real 

51 



to us than any historic character? King Lear is far more real 
than George III, and Hamlet far more real than any man 
whoever enacted the part. William Pitt once said that he 
had learned from Shakespeare all he knew of English his- 
tory. On reflection we see the truth of this most pregnant 
saying. Within the limits of a single historical play, like 
that of "Henry VIII," which can be read or enacted in a 
single evening, Shakespeare has put into a single art form 
the whole movement — the essential truth — of a great epoch 
of history. It might be granted that not one word which 
Shakespeare puts into the mouth of king or queen or cardi- 
nal was actually uttered by them. Yet these words express 
to us what these people stood for in the world, and what 
they did, and far more truly, in fact, than would all the multi- 
tude of their actual words and deeds convey it to us if they 
could be recorded. And thus we arrive at the surprising 
truth that true art is truer than fact. 

It is not, therefore, nature herself which we love in the 
highest, most enduring way, but nature interpreted and puri- 
fied and transformed and endowed by the genius of man. 
Nature does not interpret herself. It is the penetrating eye 
of the man of spiritual insight which alone can do this; and, 
if his insight be true, he sees at the same time that, higher 
than nature, is art. Art is the articulate, the rational, the 
clearly spoken word. It is art which has, in very literal 
truth, given nature to our comprehension and love, and 
never nature which has given art. 

The presence of art in the world will only be explained 
when we see that it comes from the demand of the soul 
of man to image to itself the true, the ideal, and hence the 
permanent; and this must be, in the case of art, the beautiful. 
Art springs from the power of man's mind to create ideals 
and its impulse to realize them. Nature deals with the acci- 
dental, art with what is permanent. Nature has no definite 
aesthetic purpose. Art selects, creates and preserves, and 
has definite aim and unity, and all with reference to the 
soul of man. True art is the portrayal of the true and admir- 
able and divine in forms appreciable to the senses. The 
same quality of our nature which gives us through the me- 
dium of our senses, art, gives us in the realm of the intellect, 
science and philosophy, and, in the realm of conduct and the 
emotions, morals and religion. Viewed thus, we see that art 
is the product of reason, and takes its high rank along with 
the other rational products of — not nature, but human nature 
— mankind. 

Is it not the finest of all tributes to humanity that it is 
left to humanity itself to make our world significant and 

52 



attractive? Man has universally and instinctively put his 
final award only on the highest qualities. He has been 
greedy often and selfish, but to his credit it must be said he 
he has never canonized greed and selfishness. He has called 
his cities and his famous places after the names of his saints 
and heroes. There is a certain exaggeration in this saying 
of Renan, yet a truth in it: "What is the whole of America 
beside a ray of that infinite glory with which a city of the 
second or third order — Florence, Pisa, Sienna, Perugia — 
shines on Italy? 

The geography of the earth's surface is only the descrip- 
tion of so much commonplace gravel until the whole is ideal- 
ized and transformed and illuminated by the genius of man. 



Lines to Robert Burns 

By Irvin Mattick 
Dedicated to The Burns Club of St. Louis 

The cruel North wind's bitter gale 

Beat on the silent fields of Avhite, 
When in this beauteous, mortal vale 

Thy spirit first beheld the light; 
The lintwhite's warbling song was hushed, 

The leafless woods were brown and still, 
And 'neath its snowy mantle rushed 

The ever restless, whimpling rill. 

Across un-charted seas of Youth, 

Harassed by many a treach'rous strand — 
Led by the constant star of Truth, 

Thy soul hath gained the Promised Land: 
And from thy streams, thy fields and flowers, 

From quiet shades of trembling groves, 
Thy songs arise, — and vine-clad bowers 

Breathe tunes of thy immortal loves! 

For each wee creature, great and small, 

That drinks the wine of heaven's air, — 
Thy heart some tenderness lets fall, 

Thy love some earnest praise doth spare: 
And like the blushing rose that spreads 

Its perfume on the breath of morn, 
Thy spirit's anguish ever sheds 

A gentle sweetness round its thorn! 

In songs like thine, both coofs and kings 

The warm, fraternal glow can find; 
From hearts like thine, great Nature sings 

Equality to humankind! 
And while beneath thy native skies 

Thy dust in Scotia's bosom sleeps, — 
Through the immortal centuries 

The world reveres thee, — sings and weeps I 

53 



The Scotch According to Johnson 

By Frederick W. Lehmann 
January 25, 1915 

TT IS said that the ancient Egyptians had always a death's 
head at their feasts, to remind the guests in the height of 
their enjoyment, that they were but mortal, and that the hour 
of doom might strike for any of them at any time. To intro- 
duce Doctor Samuel Johnson at a banquet of the Caledonian 
Society, is very much like bringing a death's head to a feast, 
for if heed is taken of his opinions, the guests will have small 
occasion to congratulate themselves upon their nationality. 
Of the scenery of Scotland the Doctor said, that "the noblest 
prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that 
leads him to England," and of its resources, that it afforded 
"meat and drink enough to give the inhabitants sufficient 
strength to run away from home." In his Dictionary he 
denned "oats," as "a grain which in England is generally given 
to horses, but in Scotland supports the people." Upon this 
Lord Elibank cleverly retorted, "very true, and where will 
you find such horses as in England and such men as in Scot- 
land." The Doctor decried the Scotch universities for their 
mediocrity of knowledge and said that the reputation of the 
Scotch for learning was sustained by a conspiracy to cheat 
the world by false representations. They would come up 
by droves, he said, and attest anything for the honor of Scot- 
land. In the course of a discussion concerning the literary 
achievements of Scotland and England, a Scotchman ex- 
claimed, "Ah, Dr. Johnson, what would you have said of 
Buchanan had he been an Englishman?" "Why sir," said 
Johnson, "I should not have said of Buchanan, had he been 
an Englishman, what I will now say of him as a Scotchman, 
that he was the only man of genius his country ever pro- 
duced." A severe thing to say of a country that in all its 
history it produced but one man of genius. 

Doctor Johnson was born in the year 1709 and died in 
1784. The Scotland of his youth was a greatly distracted 
country and had been for more than a hundred years. Re- 
mote and isolated as it is from the field of such conflicts 
as the Thirty Years war and the war of the Spanish Succes- 
sion, it could yet not escape the spirit of the times and was 
scourged with its full share of the strifes of religious bigotry 
and the contentions of opposing dynasties. In Scotland too 

54 



the feudal system had been carried to the ultimate and per- 
sisted in its worst features long after it had disappeared 
elsewhere. North of the Forth, Scotland was not a nation, 
but a loose aggregation of clans, whose members recognized 
no loyalty except to their chief. He was to them the sole 
and visible embodiment of sovereignty, whose will was law 
even to taking the life of their fellowman or laying down 
their own. This division into clans meant frequent quarrels 
in which the sword and the brand had a constant part. The 
energy and the efforts of the people were divided and ex- 
hausted in opposition and the united endeavor essential to the 
general welfare and a great national development was utterly 
impossible. Sir Walter Scott tells an anecdote of Lady Elph- 
instonn, who lived to the great age of more than a hundred 
years. When Claverhouse, or Claverse, as the name was 
called, was introduced to her, he said that having lived so much 
beyond the allotted term of humanity she must in her time 
have seen many changes. "Hout na, sir," said the old lady, 
"the world is just to end with me as it began. When I was 
entering life there was ane Knox deaving us a' wi' his 
clavers, and now I am ganging out, there is ane Clavers 
deaving us a' wi' his knocks." England yielded without com- 
motion its allegiance to the House of Hanover, but Scotland 
had its uprising for the Stuarts in 1715 and again in 1745. 
Clan against clan, creed against creed, dynasty against dyn- 
asty, it was a sorry time for Scotland, "poor auld Scotland" 
even Burns called her when he recorded the youthful wish 
that he for his country's sake, 

"Some useful plan or book could make 
Or sing a sang at least." 

W T hat it all meant, not when the Cotter's Saturday Night 
was written but only a little before Doctor Johnson was born, 
is grimly indicated by old Fletcher of Saltoun, the man who 
said that if he could write the songs of a nation, he would 
not care who wrote its laws. He published a plan for the 
restoration of peace and order in Scotland. The land was 
overrun with bands, half mendicant, half brigand, a menace 
everywhere to life and property and subversive of all stabil- 
ity and order. Fletcher estimated the number of them at 
two hundred thousand or one fifth of the entire population. 
The only means of discipline he could see for these people 
was to subject them to a kind of domestic slavery. Counsels 
more humane and wiser prevailed. The national determina- 
tion was to help these people up, and not to hold them down. 

55 



Education instead of repression was employed and the 
inherent virtues of the Scottish character were given right 
direction and ample scope. 

The change from the old Scotland to the new was not 
and could not be instant. Here and there, no doubt in too 
many places and comprehending too many people, far into 
Johnson's time, lingered a reminder and remainder of the 
evil days that had been, but true it was now of Scotland as 
was said by Curran that "she winged her eagle flight, full 
into the blaze of every science, with an eye that never 
winked and a wing that never tired" and by virtue of the 
labors of men whom Dr. Johnson knew or might have known, 
"she was crowned with the spoils of every art and decked 
with the wreaths of every muse." She need not hark back 
two hundred years to George Buchanan as a solitary son of 
genius, but could present her children of high achievement 
in every field of civilized endeavor and challenge fair com- 
parison with the world. 

In philosophy there was Thomas Reid and later Dugald 
Stewart, as subtle reasoners as any of the metaphysicians of 
Europe, in physical science Doctor Joseph Black, whose ex- 
periments and discoveries in chemistry made him in the judg- 
ment of Lavoisier "the Nestor of the Chemical Revolution," 
and Dr. John Hunter, first among the surgeons of the day. 
In literature there were Blair, Mackenzie and Thomson, 
looming now less large than once they did, dwarfed by com- 
parison with younger sons of Scotland. Smollett was divid- 
ing honors with Fielding and Richardson in English fiction. 
Robertson and Hume were writing their histories and if Rob- 
ertson is not read so much as he was in his own time, if 
later works have taken the place of his, Hume's history is 
still the book through which we know the England of the 
period to which it relates. William Murray had come to 
England and won high place as a statesman, but greater 
renown as Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the Court of King's 
Bench, the greatest judge Britain ever produced. It was his 
work that brought the commercial law of England into har- 
mony with its commercial usages, and it was he who declared 
as a principle of law that the air of England was too pure 
for a slave to breathe. Mansfield's accomplishments were 
too much for even Johnson's prejudice to resist, and he con- 
ceded, saving his consistency by the qualification, that 
"much may be made of a Scotchman if he be caught young." 
There came another Scotchman to England, beginning his 
career in the army, but leaving the profession of arms for 
that of the law, he attained a first place in the annals of 

56 



the English bar, Thomas, afterward Lord Chancellor Erskine, 
whose forensic arguments are today the inspiration and 
despair of every lawyer ambitious of the fame of eloquence. 
Him also, the Doctor would accept as a great man and also 
explain as having been caught young. There was a third 
however, caught young, but caught in America, of whom 
we may be sure the Doctor did not approve, and we need not 
wonder at this, and that was John Paul Jones, the first man 
to carry the American flag across the seas, and the first to 
whom in fair and equal fight a British frigate was made to 
lower her colors. And this Scotchman had humor as well as 
courage, for when he learned that his opponent, Captain 
Pearson, had been made a baronet for his gallant defense of 
his ship, he said, if he will give me another chance I'll see 
to it that they make a lord of him. 

In the year 1776 appeared the Wealth of Nations, by 
Adam Smith, a book that marks an era in political literature 
and that may fairly be said to have created the science of 
political economy. Much as has been written upon the sub- 
ject it maintains its place as the classic of economic science. 
The principles it announces are the staples of present day 
political discussion and it is the armory from which are 
drawn the arguments by which those principles are supported. 
Its doctrines have not received universal assent, but they 
compel universal attention and consideration. Around them 
was waged the chief controversy in the Presidential contest 
just closed. The quality of genius must reside in a book 
which dealing with a subject of perennial controversy has 
maintained its supremacy for more than a hundred years. 

In the science and art of engineering the Scotland of 
Johnson's later days claims absolutely first place. James 
Watt did not discover the great power that was dormant in 
the elusive vapors of the tea kettle, he did not invent the 
steam engine. The Marquis of Worcester, Savery, New- 
comen and others had labored in that field before him and 
had done something, much indeed, to make it a thing of util- 
ity. But as they left it and as it was found by Watt, it was 
a crude machine and of simple and limited function. What 
James Watt did has been so happily described by one of his 
own countrymen that I would not venture to speak of it in 
other terms. 

"We have said that Mr. Watt was the great improver of 
the steam engine; but in truth as to all that is admirable in 
its structure, or vast in its utility, he should rather be 
described as its inventor. It was by his inventions that its 
action was so regulated as to make it capable of being 

57 



applied to the finest and most delicate manufactures, and its 
power so increased as to set weight and solidity at defiance. 
By his admirable contrivance, it has become a thing stupen- 
dous alike for its force and its flexibility, for the prodigious 
power which it can exert, and the ease, ductility and precision 
with which it can be varied, distributed and applied. The 
trunk of an elephant, that can pick up a pin or rend an oak, 
is as nothing to it. It can engrave a seal and crush masses 
of obdurate metal before it, — draw out without breaking, a 
thread as fine as gossamer, and lift a ship of war like a bauble 
in the air. It can embroider muslin, and forge an anchor, cut 
steel into ribands and impel loaded vessels against the fury 
of the winds and waves." 

It would be hard to set bounds to the blessings which 
the inventions of this man have conferred not upon his 
country, but upon humanity. They have multiplied, many 
times the productivity of human labor in every field of 
industry, they have enormously reduced and are further 
reducing the element of mere drudging toil, and they have 
increased in every rank of life the sum of man's comforts and 
enjoyments, and the measure of his happiness. Of all the 
sons of Britain, whose lineaments are presented in the mar- 
bles of Westminster Abbey, there is none who has a greater 
claim upon our gratitude than James Watt. His long life 
was one unbroken course of well-doing for his fellowmen. 

Robert Burns had written, but had not published when 
Doctor Johnson died. Would the Doctor have found his 
verse crude, because it was in a dialect the Doctor may have 
thought barbarous, could he have resisted the wonderful 
appeal of the Scottish songster? I do not believe it. And 
indeed I cannot help but think that the greater part of John- 
son's manifestation of prejudice against the Scotch was mere 
pretense. He was fond of controversy and felt that he must 
maintain any opinion he had once expressed. Besides he 
loved to play with his follower Boswell, to try his forbear- 
ance and friendship, and there was no way to do this so well 
as by taunts upon his nationality. But the genius of Burns 
needs not the seal of any man's approval. He had the power 
of insight which discovers charm and beauty, where to the 
common vision things are ugly or barren, and he had the 
power of expression which made others see things as he saw 
them, and so made the world brighter and better for them. 
A greater genius he by far than George Buchanan. The Latin 
verse of Buchanan impressed Johnson with its learning, but 
it is dead today as the language in which it was written, 
while the songs of Burns, if the tongue cannot give them 
tune, sing themselves in the hearts of Britain's sons and 

58 



daughters widely as they have wandered over the world and 
the fame of the Lowland bard is fixed as first and unrivalled 
in English lyric verse, fixed as that of Shakespeare in dra- 
matic poetry. 

The themes of Burns' songs were humble and domestic. 
He found his highest inspiration in the peasant life of the 
time, into which his lot had been cast. It was for another 
bard to sing of the picturesque past of the country as seen 
through the glamour of high life. Through Sir Walter Scott, 
who was a lad of thirteen at Johnson's death, we were to 
hear the Lay of the Last Minstrel and to meet with Marmion 
and Douglas, the Lady of the Lake, and the Knight of Snow- 
down and Rhoderick Dhu. And more than this, we were to 
get from him that wonderful store of historic fiction, which 
presented to us the life of every century from the eleventh 
to his own, saving only the thirteenth, and of nearly every 
country of Europe and even of then far away India. The 
last of the Waverly novels was prepared for the press in 
1831 and more than a hundred years have passed since they 
first appeared, but they are read and reread with as fresh 
interest by the present generation as by that generation for 
which they were written and for whom their author was for 
a long time the mysterious Wizard of the North. 

In another field of literature another Scotch lad, 
younger by two years than Walter Scott, was to make his 
mark. Francis Jeffrey was not the first in time of literary 
critics, as the Edinburgh Review was not the first of Re- 
views in time. But Jeffrey did, with the help of other Scotch- 
men and with the help of Englishmen who were glad to 
become their allies, elevate literary and political criticism to 
a position of higher dignity and greater power; and for years, 
two Scotch publications, the Edinburgh Review, edited by 
Jeffrey, and Blackwood's Magazine, edited by John Wilson, 
were supreme in this field, and as they were in that time they 
have nothing to fear from comparison with the magazines 
and reviews that lie upon our tables today. 

The Scotchmen of whom I have thus briefly spoken were 
men of Johnson's time, whom he knew or might have known; 
the work of some of them was open to his knowledge, the 
work of others came too late for him. There was one other 
to whom I have referred, who has a peculiar claim to con- 
sideration here, for he also did a great work and was a man 
of genius and through him the Scotch have had a Scriptural 
revenge upon Doctor Johnson, returning indignities with 
benefits, heaping coals of fire upon his head, and that is 
James Boswell, the laird of Auchinleek. But for this Scotch- 
man, Doctor Johnson would be today a faint and half 

59 



extinct tradition. His writings are little more read than those 
of George Buchanan. We recall now and then an eccentric 
definition from his Dictionary, the opening paragraph of his 
Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, a few lines from the Vanity 
of Human Wishes, and that perhaps is all. But because of 
this Scotch laird and because of what he did, Johnson is the 
best known man of the Eighteenth Century. He lives for us, 
and he lives only, in Boswell's life of him, a book of which it 
is to be said, that it is the best of its kind ever written in 
any language. In the field of biography, it stands without a 
rival. Johnson would have scouted the idea that he was to 
owe his fame to this man, who when both were living owed his 
position among men of letters to his obsequious attendance 
upon him. Johnson was a lexicographer, essayist, poet, dra- 
matist, conversationalist, the great Cham of literature, the 
autocrat of intellectual society, whose opinion was the final 
judgment upon every question in dispute. Boswell was 
looked upon as the lackey of this great man, with just enough 
of mind to qualify for the place. For twenty years they 
were in intimate personal relation. Boswell knew Johnson 
much as a valet knows his master and Johnson knew Boswell 
much as the master knows his valet. But here the master 
was a hero to his valet. No indifference could cool the ardor 
of Boswell's affection, and no indignity could provoke him to 
leave from following after his master. His fidelity seems at 
times servile as that of a dog and our feeling for him has 
often a tinge of contempt. But through it all he had a pur- 
pose and he realized it. He proposed to himself to write the 
Life of Johnson, and he wrote it, and through this book, for 
all posterity, Johnson is the child of Boswell, the valet has 
become father to the master. In its pages we see the great 
Doctor, in his waking and even in his sleeping hours, at 
home and abroad, at work and at rest, in sickness and in 
health, in good humor and in ill. We know his walk and 
his talk, his great cane and his great words, his scrofula 
marked face and his snuff colored clothes. We know all his 
haunts and habits, his taste in food and drink, his choice of 
books and friends, his manners and his morals, and we know 
that this great gruff man is a kind man and a good one, and 
we bear with him as did Boswell, and we bear with Boswell, 
because of his vital book, which gives us a man of a century 
that has gone, to know him as no other book makes us know 
a man, as a familiar and a friend, and not as a mere steel 
engraving with a catalogue of virtues inscribed beneath. And 
so, let us because of Johnson according to the Scotch, for- 
give the Scotch according to Johnson. 

60 



1914 

(^ UESTS at the Burns Night of 1914 were Charles Nagel, 
Max Kotany, Clark McAdams, James D. Grant and 
Rev. Dr. J. F. Dickie, senior pastor of the American church 
at Berlin. 

Among many others who sent greetings this year to the 
Burns Club of St. Louis were Lord Rosebery, Lord Dun- 
fermline, Sir James Sivewright, and Professors Wilson and 
Lawson of the Glasgow University. 

The address of this Night was delivered by Henry King, 
editor of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. It was almost the 
last of Captain King's appearances as a speaker, a career 
which began in the first year of the Civil war when he was 
known in Central Illinois as "the boy orator" and when he 
was in demand at the patriotic meetings to give voice to 
recruiting enthusiasm. 

Rev. Dr. Dickie recited with Scotch spirit "The Songs 
of Robert Burns" and at the earnest plea of the members 
gave the verses for publication in the Burns Nights book. 



Manuscript Poems Attributed 
to Burns 

Through Archer Wall Douglas, one of the members, the 
club recently came into the possession of poems attributed 
to Burns and not found in the usual editions of Burns. 
Joseph Welsh of Pasadena, a correspondent of Mr. Douglas, 
knowing his interest in all that pertains to the poet, sent 
him two poems which Mr. Douglas promptly added to the 
literary Burnsiana of the club. Mr. Welsh explained that 
these poems were sent to him by his brother who lives in 
Glasgow and who is something of an antiquarian and a lover 
of Burns. One of these poems is "Words o' Cheer." Another 
is Burns' reply "To a Lord's Invitation." The original ot 
this poem is said to be in the possession of Mrs. John Moffatt 
of St. Andrews. Burns, the explanation is, had been invited 
by a nobleman to go on an excursion with a party to Bass 
Rock. On returning to the castle, the poet was directed to 
the servants' hall to dine. When the lord and his guests 
had finished dinner, Burns was called in to entertain. He 
handed to the lord this poem, turned and left the castle. 

61 



The authenticity of this poem was claimed by Robert 
Dunn, president of the Aberdeen Border Counties Associa- 
tion. Mr. Dunn read the lines at a meeting of the associa- 
tion. He said the grandfather of Mr. Moffatt had copied it 
from the manuscript of Robert Burns. But D. McNaught, 
of Kilmaurs, editor of the Burns Chronicle and the Scottish 
authority on Burns, commented upon the discovery of a new 
Burns poem and gave this terse opinion: "This Robert 
Burns, who is on such good terms with himself, is certainly 
not the poet." 

To a Lord's Invitation 

Manuscript Poem Attributed to Burns, Presented by Joseph Welsh 

of Pasadena, through A. W. Douglas, to the 

Burns Club of St. Louis. 

My lord, I would not fill your chair, 
Tho' you be proudest noble's heir. 
I come this night to join your feast 
As equal of the best at least. 
'Tis true that cash with me is scant, 
And titles trifles that I want; 
The king has never made me kneel 
To stamp my manhood with his seal. 
But what of that? The king on high 
Who took less pains with you than I 
Has filled my bosom and my mind 
With something better of its kind 
Than your broad acres — something which 
I cannot well translate to speech, 
But by its impulse I can know 
'Tis deeds, not birth, that make men low. 
Your rank, my lord, is but a loan, 
But mine, thank heaven, is all my own. 
A peasant, 'tis my pride to be; 
Look round and round your hall and see 
Who boasts a higher pedigree. 
I was not fit, it seems, to dine 
With those fox-hunting heroes fine, 
But only came to bandy jests 
Among your lordship's hopeful guests. 
There must be here a sad mistake — 
To be a buffoon for drink and meat 
And a poor Earl's tax-paid seat! 
No! die my heart ere such a shame 
Descends on Robert Burns' name. 
62 



Robert Burns, an Immortal Memory 

By Captain Henry King, Editor of The St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 
January 26, 1914 

f WISH I could say something new about Burns. But you 
know it is practically impossible, and to attempt such a 
task would be to invoke the censure of his last injunction: 
"Don't let the awkward squad fire above me." His fame has 
run all over the world, like one of the wild flowers he loved 
so well. He has been discussed from every angle of his 
career, from every point of analysis in his works and his 
character. His name is in the full sense a household word; 
his songs are a part of nature, so to speak, like those of the 
birds and rippling brooks and the winds in the trees. It is 
easy to say that the way of his life was not wise, which is 
only to say that he was human — so very human that man- 
kind proudly claims him for its own over all other poets, by 
reason largely of his elemental kinship in the blunders and 
follies that constitute a large share of all our lives. There 
is one feature in his wayward record, to be sure, which stands 
out as a glaring admonition to those who need it; but for 
obvious reasons I am not going to dwell upon it in this 
goodly company. The St. Louis Burns Club is a place where 
temperance abides, within the rule of reason, tempered by 
charity and good-fellowship. Only one of its members, so 
far as I know, has ever been on the water-wagon, and he 
declares that he got up and gave his seat to a lady. He was 
right, manifestly, for George is always Wright, and could not 
be otherwise without changing his name. 

The passion of Burns for strong drink was supplemented, 
you are well aware, by a besetting fondness for pretty girls. 
Being a poet, that was perhaps to be expected of him, though 
such a habit, I am bound to say, is not restricted to poets. 
Nor should it be. For my part, I distrust the sanity, or at 
least the good taste, of any man who does not admire a 
pretty girl — and all girls are pretty, more or less. Certainly 
Burns seemed to think so, and told them so as fast as he came 
in contact with them. Thereby hang many tales of romance, 
of intrigue, of adventure, and often of trouble and bitter 
sorrow. He flattered and courted the comely girls of the 
neighborhood as a regular pastime, and it must be admitted 
that he did not always play a fair game with them. He 
swore eternal pledges to them which mostly proved to be 
mere perjuries for Jove to laugh at. His fancy turned from 

63 



one to another of them as frequently as the changes of the 
moon beneath which he was wont to sing his enticing songs 
to them and take his pay in the sweetness of their cheeks 
and lips. He captured their hearts and played with them, 
and broke them, and now and then left behind him in their 
laps wee, bonnie hostages to fortune having the father's eyes 
but the mothers' names. Possibly there is some ingenuity 
of deduction by which this phase of the poet's life may be 
justified as a necessary factor in the development of his 
genius. That is a question for the casuists. At any rate, 
we have the poetry as a rich heritage, and the charming 
girls who inspired so much of it cannot be spared from the 
story of Burns and his literary distinction. 

It would be interesting as well as instructive to learn 
how many people have read and treasured the writings of 
Burns as compared with those of other distinguished authors. 
His books are oftener quoted, perhaps, than any other, ex- 
cepting the Bible and Shakespeare. In the William A. Smith 
collection in Washington — the best Burns collection in this 
country — there are 550 separate editions of his works, 135 of 
them being American. This gives a suggestive idea of the 
number of his readers and admirers. He is known to be 
almost, if not quite, as popular in the United States as he is 
in Scotland. This is easy to understand when we take 
account of the fact that there is probably a stronger and 
wider infusion of Scotch than of any other alien blood in our 
country. There can be little doubt about it if we include 
with the Scotch strain proper that extraordinary blend known 
as Scotch-Irish, which has exerted and is still exerting such 
a pronounced influence in our affairs. You cannot read a 
chapter of American history — political, industrial, literary or 
ecclesiastical — without finding in it the leaven of oatmeal and 
heather. If the Puritans had not come over here and estab- 
lished civil and religious liberty, and evolved the Yankee 
type of character, the Scotch would have done it sooner or 
later. Indeed the Scotch and the Yankees have so much in 
common that it is hard to tell where the one stops and the 
other begins. They step on one another's heels and replicate 
one another's ruling traits and tendencies throughout the 
course of our national growth and progress. Just now, for 
immediate example, and by no means for the first time, we 
have a President whose best and strongest qualities came 
from Scotland. Those not so good, if any there be, have 
probably been picked up in his dealings with the irrepressible 
office-seekers. 

Burns did not know much about America, but he shared 
its spirit and its dreams or he could never have written 

64 



"A Man's a Man for a' That." He was only a lad of seven- 
teen when our Declaration of Independence was sent out to 
the world, but he was old enough to realize its significance 
and to applaud its sentiments. When somebody proposed 
the health of the British prime minister, it was young Bobby 
Burns who rose and exclaimed, "Here's to the health of a 
better man, George Washington." Thus his reason con- 
firmed his imagination, and both as citizen and as poet he 
was a steadfast apostle of democracy. It is trite but ever 
proper to repeat that the crowning, merit of his literary work 
is its close adherence to common facts and familiar symbols. 
His feet are always on the homely soil, his heart is always 
keeping time with the impulses and the interests of the plain 
people, of whom it has been said that God must love them or 
there would not have been so many of them made. His 
poems contain no problems. They are as simple as grass 
and sunshine, as kitchen smoke and spring water. But gen- 
erally speaking, aside from verses of the antic disposition, 
they are not trivial. For while they are thronged with the 
ordinary things and everyday people of the earth, there is 
always at the core of these humble objects a meaning that 
makes for truth and right and widespread beneficence. 

It is a curious fact — a paradox, we might say — that while 
Burns was thoroughly Scotch in most respects, he utterly 
lacked one notable characteristic of his countrymen. He was 
a lifelong failure in money matters. Scotland denied him 
nothing but her proverbial sense of thrift. He was born in 
poverty and he remained there. With all his brilliant intel- 
lect, he could not make a living. When he was doing some 
of his best work, you remember, he was keeping the wolf 
from the door by acting as a whiskey-gauger. His pay was 
less than $30.00 a month, and on that he had to support 
himself, a wife and three children. Little wonder that he 
sought the flowing bowl and drowned his bad luck in ribaldry 
and carousal. How pleased he must have been when the 
first edition of his poems — 600 copies — brought him a profit 
of $100.00; and he was thus enabled to appease his insistent 
creditors and keep himself out of jail. Then came his visit 
to Edinburgh, and the publication of a second edition of the 
poems, which yielded him $2,500.00 — a princely sum for him, 
but it was soon squandered. His business operations were 
a constant irony, due to the defects of his qualities. So, with 
rare intervals of relief, the claws of penury were ever at his 
throat. 

He met adversity with little patience and less wisdom; 
it must be said. His mind was in a constant state of pro- 
test and antipathy against his material conditions. He was 

65 



an indefatigable insurgent. To hate the rich in particular 
was a kind of religion with him. If he were living now he 
might find cause to qualify his animosity in that relation. I 
am sure he could be persuaded to admire Andrew Carnegie, 
in spite of his riches, and because of his fine example as a 
philanthropic spendthrift. And surely he would be glad to 
shake hands with Mr. Bixby, the amiable and excellent Presi- 
dent of this Club, who has bought so many Burns manu- 
scripts, not always at a bargain, and one of whose avocations, 
the one he likes best, I think, is that of cheerfully paying the 
annual deficits of various useful organizations to which he 
belongs. But with Burns throughout his life there was no 
armistice and no compromise in his warfare upon wealth and 
power and privilege. The trodden worm in his case was 
always turning; indeed, the worm was so fond of turning that 
it often turned when it was not trodden upon at all, but only 
fancied that it was, or feared that it might be. 

There are those who contend that poverty, with all its 
drawbacks, has yet some points of advantage. As fine a 
writer and critic as Lord Rosebery recently asserted that 
the production of a poetical masterpiece seems almost to 
demand the spur of want and distress. We know that the 
poverty of Burns did not prevent him from achieving his 
fame. Would it have been equally as well with him had he 
lived in ease and luxury? Alas, his experiences in Edin- 
burgh do not justify this belief. His success there was 
remarkable, but short-lived and really detrimental. The 
glamour and elation of it turned his head, and put him hope- 
lessly in the grasp of his passions and his frailties. A process 
of steady deterioration ensued and ran its cruel course to 
the last day of his broken and shortened life. In all literary 
history there is nothing more pathetic than that scene in the 
Dumfries cottage where he lay waiting for the pale messen- 
ger with the inverted torch. His face was seamed with the 
ravages of sin and disease, and the light flickered in the 
sunken eyes — the eyes that had seen and won Nellie Kirk- 
patrick, and Peggy Thompson, and Highland Mary, and the 
rest. The place was growing dark to him, his consciousness 
was fading away. May we not imagine that he heard ghostly 
pipes and flutes and trumpets in the distance, the wistful 
echoes of his own tender and incomparable songs? His two 
children tiptoed to his bedside, illy clad and poorly fed. 
Then, as the end drew near, they sent for the wife and 
mother, the Jean Armour of his buoyant youth, and she came 
promptly, bless her heart, and took his hands in hers, and 
kissed him, as he passed tranquilly hence, and became to the 
world an immortal memory. 

66 



The Songs of Robert Burns 

Given by Rev. Dr. J. F. Dickie of Berlin 

Recited at the meeting of the Burns Club of St. Louis, 
January 26, 1914 

When Januar' wind blaws sharp and snell, 
The heart aye fondly turns 
To the banks and braes o' Bonnie Doon, 
The home of Robert Burns. 

A hundred years are past and gone 
And four and fifty more, 
Since Robin cam' — Aye! sent of God 
Unto the Carrick shore. 

The gaucy gossip yet we see 
Keek in the bairnies' loof. 
Ye'll follow love's recruiting drum, 
But, bairn, ye'll be nae coof. 

Belyve, he hears his mither croon 
Some auld, auld, Scottish tune, 
And aye his faither maks the Buik 
When ance the day's wark 's dune. 

The auld Scots sang stoon thro his heart 
As tides run in the sea; 
His faither's prayer he'll ne'er forget, 
Until the day he dee. 

O'er sune the laddie feels the grip 
O' poortith cauld and care, 
And sees his faither sair distrest 
Wi' griefs he fain would share. 

Then love to Rab came flichtering down 
As gloaming comes at e'en, 
And in love's light each Scottish lass 
Shines fair as Scotia's queen. 

Thus love -and song twin born spring up 
From fountains in his heart, 
He loves because he needs must love, 
He sings by Nature's art. 

67 



He sings the Lass o' Ballochmyle, 
And money a sonsy quean, 
He sings John Anderson, my Joe, 
And eke o' bonnie Jean. 

He sings "A man's a man for a' " 
Though man was made to mourn; 
Laments puir Mary Queen o' Scot 
Wi' grief and sorrow born. 

He tells how lion-hearted Bruce, 

Put proud King Edward down, 

And grieves to think Tarn Samson's gone, 

Frae auld Kilmarnock town. 

He paints the jolly beggars met 

A raudy gangrel core, 

Wha's den shook Poosie Nancy's wa's, 

That night they held the splore. 

He pictures Tarn o' Shanter's ride 
In nicht o' blackest murk, 
Pursued by witching Kutty Sark 
Frae Alloway's haunted kirk. 

But yet our poet — soothe to say 
In Change House tarries long, 
And oft, alas! the reins are given 
To passions wild and strong. 

Then black remorse takes up its seat 
Within his troubled breast — 
Yet aye he hears the voice that says, 
"Come unto Me and rest." 

And aye he cries, O Scotia's sons 
Shun ill; than me be wiser. 
O may ye better reck the rede, 
Than ever did the adviser. 

Repentance hill is hard to spiel, 
Stey, Stey's repentance brae, 
Sin's joys are short, its grief is long 
And thorns bestrew its way. 
68 



As thus he spake death timed his breath, 
But splendor crowns his name, 
O'er all the earth his songs are heard, 
Aye, greener grows his fame. 

Wherever beats the Scottish heart, 
Who speaks with Scottish tongue, 
Leaps at the name of Robert Burns, 
Joys when his songs are sung. 

And Scotia's sons shall bear the gree 
So long's each peasant learns 
The Psalms our fathers loved so well 
And the songs of Robert Burns. 



The Bixby and Lehmann Collections 

T N President Bixby and Frederick W. Lehmann the club 
has two members whose collections of Burns manuscripts 
and Burns rare editions are of international repute. At one 
Burns Night, Mr. Bixby and Mr. Lehmann showed from their 
collections two copies of the same poem by Burns, both 
copies fully authenticated as in the handwriting of Burns. 
This was easily explained. The poet in his earlier efforts not 
infrequently made several copies of the same unpublished 
poem to send to intimate friends. 

At one meeting the members handled reverently the 
"Kilmarnock Burns," a small, cheaply printed book, the 
first issue of Burns in print, with this title and preface: 

Poems 

chiefly in the 

Scottish Dialect 

by 

Robert Burns 

"If any Critic catches at 'the word genius, the author 
tells him, once for all, that he certainly looks upon himself 
as possest of some poetic abilities, otherwise his publishing 
in the manner he has done would be a manoeuvre below the 
worst character, which, he hopes, his worst enemy will ever 
give him; but to the genius of a Ramsay, or the glorious 
dawnings of the poor, unfortunate Ferguson, he with equal 
unaffected sincerity, declares, that, even in his highest pulse 
of vanity, he has not the most distant pretensions. These 
two justly admired Scotch Poets he has often had in his 
eye in the following pieces; but rather with a view to kindle 
at their flame, than for servile imitation." 

In the second Edinburg edition the club traced the pro- 
gress of the poet. The copy viewed was the identical one 
presented by the author to "John McMurdo, esq., Drum- 
lanrig." On the flyleaf, in Burns' handwriting, was: "Will 
Mr. McMurdo do me the favor to accept of these volumes; 
a trifling, but sincere mark of the very high respect I bear 
for his worth as a man, his manners as a gentleman, and his 
kindness as a friend. However inferior, now or afterwards, 
I may rank as a poet; one honest virtue, to which few poets 
can pretend, I trust I shall ever claim as mine: to no man, 
whatever his station in lite, or his power to serve me, have 
I ever paid a compliment, at the expense of truth. 

THE AUTHOR" 

70 



Burns was wont to write in presentation copies of his 
books something which has added lasting value to those 
copies which have been preserved. In a copy of "The Scotch 
Musical Museum, humbly dedicated to the Catch Club insti- 
tuted at Edinburgh, June, 1771, by James Johnson, Pub- 
lished 1787," the poet wrote: 

"To Ann Masterton from Robert Burns. Beware of 
Bonnie Annie. I composed this song out of compliment to 
Miss Ann Masterton, the daughter of my friend, Allan Mas- 
terton, the author of the air, 'Strathallan's Lament,' and two 
or three others in this work." 

A laugh went round the club chamber as President Bixby 
held up and read from an ancient looking book which had 
recently come into his possession. The title was: "Catalogue 
of Five Hundred Celebrated Authors of Great Britain now 
living, the whole arranged in alphabetical order; and includ- 
ing a complete list of their publications, with occasional 
strictures and anecdotes of their lives, London, 1788." 

"Burns, Robert. A ploughman in the County of Ayr in 
the Kingdom of Scotland. He was introduced to notice by 
a paper in a periodical publication called 'The Lounger,' and 
his poems were published in the year 1787. Mr. Burns was 
upon the point of embarking for America, when he was pre- 
vented from executing his intention by a letter exciting him 
to further pursuit of his literary career by Doctor Blacklock." 

And this was all the Who's Who of 1788 had to say of 
Robert Burns! 

Another of President Bixby's marvelous collection, which 
the club viewed with no ordinary interest, was Charles Lamb's 
Commonplace Book. It afforded a revelation of what Lamb 
thought of Burns. The first thing in the book, copied in 
Lamb's handwriting, is a song by Burns, "Oh, Saw ye Bonie 
Lesley." Burns often used this form of one "n" in bonnie. 
Nearly at the end of the book, again in Lamb's hand, is 
"John Anderson, My Joe." And at the end of the book 
is, copied by Lamb, "Auld Lang Syne." 

A very rare edition which President Bixby brought to 
one meeting of the club was printed in 1795, — "An address 
to the Deil, by Robert Burns, with the Answer by John 
Lauderdale, near Wigton." 

Another very rare edition of Burns, only one copy of which 
has appeared in the English or American marts of rare books, 
consists of "Verses to the Memory of James Thomson, 
Author of the Seasons," together with "A Poem written in 
Carse Hermitage by Nithside" and an epitaph on Sir Isaac 
Newton. 

71 



And still another edition bears the long title of "The 
Auld Farmer's Salutation to His Auld Mare Maggie on Giv- 
ing Her a Ripp of Corn to Hansel in the New Year, to which 
are added An address to Scotch Haggis New Year's Day 
and Tarn Samson's Elegy by Robert Burns, the Ayrshire 
Poet." The autograph of Burns appears on the title page. 

Lines to St. Louis Burnsians 

By W. Hunter, author of "Thoughts of a Toiler," 

Clydebank, Scotland 

In honor of their latest publication 

Dear Brither Burnsians owre the sea, 
Accept this hamely screed frae me, 
Wha never in this worl' may see 

You o' your faces; 
But yet as plain as ocht can be 

True freenship traces. 

I tak' my bannet off my broo 
Wi' great respect to sic as you; 
And let a Scotchman tell ye hoo 

You're gien him pleasure; 
I've read your "Nichts Wi' Burns" richt throo — 

It's juist a treasure. 

On ilka page gleam gems o' thocht, 
Weel polished and sae finely wrocht, 
They match the richest ever brocht 

Frae wit or learnin'; 
Tho' faur and wide sae keenly socht 
For speech or sermon. 

It pleases me mair than ye ken 

To learn ye ha'e sic able men, 

-Sae eloquent wi' tongue and pen 

To gie Rab honour. 
Ye speak o' glorious nichts ye spen'; 

I dinna wonner. 

But mind ye we've a guid club here, 
I wish ye were a bit mair near, 
Then feth ye wadna need to speir 

Hoo we are daein'. 
The "Jolly Beggars" herty cheer 

Ye wad be ha'ein'. 

That canna be, yet prood I feel 

In twa three lines to wish ye weel, 

Wi' money anither Clydebank cheil 

Wha sends his greetin'; 
And fain wad owre the waters steal 

To your next meetin'. 

72 



In Memory of Robert Burns 

By Irvin Mattick 
January 26, 1914 

I 

O Bard of the beatific soul, 

Thou master of the heart's true chords, — 
Though Scotia's skies above thee roll, 

We sing thy pure love-breathing words — 
Great heart that lived and loved and knew 

Each passion's throe and kindling joy, 
Sleep on, O brother of the true, 

Serenely reft of Fate's annoy! 

II 

No more for thee the lintwhistle's lay 

Swells from the banks o' bonny Doon 
No ling'ring stay of less'ning ray 

Recalls thy Mary's death too soon — 
Along the Lugar now no more 

The happy love-tryst do ye meet — 
Nor steal by Ayr's embowered shore, 

Mid the implicit thraldom sweet! 

Ill 

Thy ploughshare turns no mousie out 

To face the winter's biting frost, — 
Oft like oursel's on poor tithes' route 

With all but ardent spirit lost; 
Where Tarn with ale turned noddle rode, 

With rev'rent awe we wond'ring tread 
And learn thy mirthful moral code — 

How pleasures are like poppies spread! 

IV. 
Rest on, great singer of the heart, 

Within thy native Scotland sleep — 
Thy life was the Apostle's part 

Of misery on which we weep — 
But though through life thou wert denied 

The weight of Fortune's golden crown, 
In thee the breath alone hath died, 

Leaving immortal thy renown. 
73 



The Influence of Burns on Scotch 
Theology 

By Rev. Dr. J. L. Scott of Philadelphia 

Read by one of the members of The Burns Club of St. Louis 

January 26, 1914 

Theology is indebted to poetry for its truest interpreta- 
tion. 

The poet does not create; he expresses. He is in the 
possession of an insight, an intuitive discrimination denied 
the average mind. 

Milton had quite as much to do in shaping Theology 
as had Calvin himself. 

Calvin systematized doctrine; but Milton was the biog- 
rapher of evil, and gave the world its proper conception of 
the Prince of Darkness. I wish to speak of a greater poet 
and review somewhat his influence on Theology. 

They who fail to find Theology in Burns haven't read 
him. Theology is a wide term. 

The botanist who studies nothing but geraniums is not 
liable to get very far in his profession; and the moralist who 
finds no Theology outside his confession is a botanist of a 
single flower. Dean Stanley said: "That anything which 
omitted the influence of Burns was unworthy the name of 
Scotch ecclesiastical history," and Prof. Blaikie declared that 
Burns was the father of that particular school of Presby- 
terianism to which he belonged. As to his genius there can 
be but one opinion. He is next to Shakespeare, the universal 
poet — the one wandering minstrel, the music of whose harp 
is alike welcome at every door. 

This is the miracle of modern times. On January 25th, 
1759, in a clay biggin at Ayr, a peasant father saw one more 
added to his already poverty-stricken household. 

God let loose this freshly created spirit upon the storm. 
One hundred years from that night, in a thousand cities and 
hamlets, princes and peasants met to celebrate the event. 
The anniversary of no man's birth in eighteen hundred 
years was ever so generally marked as his. What did this 
man do? He wrote poetry. To know any man one must be 
re-born himself and live when he lived. We are all created 
out of the dust of our birth places, all with the exception of 
Genius. This is ever a contradiction to its age. 

74 



When Burns was created Genius had little else to do; 
God hadn't made a poet for many years. This species of 
creation He reserves for Himself. 

There had come and gone a line of versifiers, to whom 
poetry was the euphony of the final word. From Johnson 
to Burns were ten laureate poets, not one of whom with the 
exception of Dryden is worthy a place in the Presbyterian 
Hymnal. 

Poetry is more than the tape line of written speech; it 
is the human heart beating through the words and passion 
of a single man. In the last century that man was Burns. 
He was not only a poet but also a Presbyterian. Poverty and 
Presbyterianism met him upon the threshold of life. They 
often go together. 

And further, he loved the Church as every patriotic 
Scotchman must. 

The thistle of Scotland and the burning bush of the Kirk 
grew side by side. Their history was one. 

At the death of Elizabeth England had a crown, but no 
head to put it on. In Scotland the reverse was true; she 
possessed a head, but crowns were scarce. 

An exchange was made, Scotland furnished the brains 
and England the titles. 

The scheme was successful in the State, and why should 
it not be equally so in the Church? An ecclesiastical union 
was proposed. It was the same old basis over again. 

Presbyterian brains on one side and Episcopal titles on 
the other. History repeats itself. Episcopacy is and has 
always been in favor of union. The conditions are modest; 
give her the keystone and you may take all the rest of the 
bridge. This Scotland saw and said no! So the two nations 
went out to resume the discussions of Dromclog and Both- 
well. No one could well know his country's history better 
than did Burns. It was one of the few subjects accessible 
to his young soul. There is a popular mistake concerning 
the poet's reverence for things holy. The church has been 
slow to gather the many flowers that grew in the desert 
of his life. He was a creature of the most extreme passions. 
All great poets are, but irreverence is to them an impossible 
thing. The song birds always fly toward heaven. When he 
heard one speaking lightly of the Solemn League and Cov- 
enant it aroused the Scotch ire of his blood. 

The Solemn League and Covenant 

Cost Scotland blood, cost Scotland tears! 
* But it seal'd Freedom's sacred cause — 
If thou'rt a slave, indulge thy sneers. 

75 



But did not Burns say harsh things about the Church of 
Scotland? Oh, yes, but not half so harsh as the Church, 
through its factions, said about itself. His attitude toward 
the Church was but the outgrowth of the man and his age. 
Presbyterians have never been averse to war. It is said 
that once there was no war in Israel for the space of three 
years, but no historian ever recorded that of the Presbyte- 
rian Church. It was an age of schism. A living dog was 
better than a dead lion. Everyone girded his sword on his 
thigh and he who had no sword, sold his coat and bought 
one. No one can read the ecclesiastical record of that day 
without a sense of pain. There was no issue outside of 
patronage. So it drifted into a personal wrangle, and became 
a war of Ephraim against Judah. The old lights and the 
new lights were personal parties, neither of which seem to 
have known what all this commotion was about. It was an 
age of spies and suspects. Secret traps were placed before 
every pulpit door in which to catch the mouse of heresy. 
Accusations of heresy and immoralities flew like stones from 
a sling. The battlefield was in the vicinity of Ayr, and 
Burns, exercising the right of every Scotchman, became a 
Theological critic. The Scotch ministry at that time was a 
protest against nature. It was forced into a rigidity which it 
didn't feel. The tabernacle of God had ceased to dwell with 
men, and the rent veil had been sewed together, in order 
that once more the priesthood might be separated from the 
people. As for the eldership, it had swollen into the propor- 
tions of a mountain. They were the kind that John saw 
when he declared that the four-footed beasts and elders 
formed an indiscriminate congregation about the throne. 
There was a contest between the sunshine and the rock upon 
which it fell. Where the poet was to be found one can 
easily imagine. His friends were on trial for heresy, and his 
old father, the Cotter priest, was among those suspected of 
liberal sympathies. Burns became a new light, a sort of 
David in this factional Israel. 

Dr. Hetherington, the Free Church historian, evidently 
loved Burns, but hated his friends. In this controversy he 
says: "Every person of irreligious or immoral character 
espoused the Socinian cause. And what they wanted in argu- 
ment they endeavored to supply by ridicule, slander and 
profane mockery. In an evil hour for his country and him- 
self, the new light party induced Robert Burns to join them 
and to prostitute his poetical genius in a cause so worth- 
less as the defence of such unprincipled and depraved men. 
(He is now writing of those ministers who made up the mod- 

76 



erate party of the Scotch Church.) Nay, they initiated him 
in depths of iniquity to which until then he had been a 
stranger; nay, more, destroyed the natural devotion of his 
temperament and impelled him to aim the shafts of his satire 
against his Church. The future dark career and melancholy 
end of this unhappy son of genius is mainly to be ascribed 
to the fatal taint which he received from his intercourse with 
the moderate Socinian new light ministers of Ayrshire and 
their adherents. Those guilty men have been already named 
and their misled victim's poems, when rightly understood, 
will inflict upon them the retributive justice of branding their 
unhonored memory with the impress of perpetual infamy." 
Let brotherly love continue. Literature will be searched in 
vain for a spirit more vindictive than this conservative Theo- 
logian betrays against the new school element of his church 
and he was but an echo of the spiteful thunder that spent 
its force in the age of , Burns. Out of this black soul of 
church war grew the "Twa Herds," the ministers that came 
to blows. "Holy Willie's Prayer," an old light elder, who 
reproved him, then stole the Church's money. "The Kirk's 
Alarm," the Rev. Mr. McGill, of Ayr, had written an essay 
on the Atonement and was on trial for heresy. Though, says 
the poet, one of the worthiest and ablest of the whole priest- 
hood of the Kirk, yet is in danger of being thrown out with 
his family upon this very December day and left to the mercy 
of the winter's storm. These poems and others like them are 
limited by their localities. They were so many arrows shot 
like those of Jonathan in behalf of friends in trouble. Read 
them in the lamplight of that age and they reflect alike honor 
upon his genius and his manhood. 

I have thus attempted to give you a whiff of the atmos- 
phere in which he lived, for without this no one can estimate 
correctly either the man or his influence. His satire naturally 
aroused public indignation, but the ultimate effect was good. 
It discriminated between religion and its formal substitute. 

For the sacred flame of true devotion he had the most 
profound respect, and for the strange fire of pretense an 
equal hatred. 

"All hail religion! Maid divine! 
Pardon a muse sae mean as mine, 
Who in her rough, imperfect line, 

Thus daurs to name thee, 
To stigmatize false friends o' thine 
Can ne'er defame thee." 
77 



By the chords of poetic satire he scourged those who sold 
the truth and drove them from the temple of God. The 
Church realized there was "a chiel among them taking notes, 
and faith, he would print it," and from motives high or low 
awoke to something better. His theology was broader than 
that of his day. The Confession of Faith was intended for the 
book-shelf, and not for the market places, but the Scotch 
Clergy sought to make it a text-book of practical life. 

They endeavored to unfold the subtleties of election and 
absolute sovereignty. The two wings of theology flapped 
themselves in each other's faces, but no logic could stand 
against the satire of the poet. 

His side ultimately won, but long after he was in his 
grave. The invocation of Holy Willie's prayer, says the 
Rev. Mr. Paul, was but the metrical version of every prayer 
offered up by those who called themselves the pure reformed 
Church of Scotland. 

"Oh, Thou wha in the heavens dost dwell, 
Wha as it pleases best Thysel', 
Sends one to heaven and ten to hell 

A' for Thy glory 
And no for ony good or ill 
They've done afore Thee." 

That parody on the Gospel is dead. It may linger about 
the bogs of Ireland or the swamps of the South, but as an 
influence has ceased to be, and with its departure came in a 
broader conception of man. 

Burns was the poet of humanity. He saw the mills of 
oppression grinding out their grist of misery and dared to 
take his place among the poor. 

"Is there, for honest poverty, 

That hangs his head, and a' that? 
The coward-slave, we pass him by, 
We dare be poor for a' that! 
For a' that, and a' that, 

It's coming yet for a' that, 

That man to man, the warld o'er, 

Shall brothers be for a' that." 

"I've just been reading to the Queen," wrote Norman 
McLeod, "her two favorites from Burns, 'John Anderson My 
Jo, John,' and 'A Man's a' Man for a' That.' " Who is my 
neighbor? Twice has that question been answered, once by 
a parable and once by a poem. 



The element of mercy was sadly lacking in Scotch theol- 
ogy. Our Confession, like Napoleon, was born in the trenches 
of war. This was natural. Men who had fought for their 
lives were not liable to be over-sentimental. I don't wish to 
be misunderstood. The Westminster symbol is to me the 
master compendium of all Theology. Burns respected it. 
He didn't suggest revision or even a simpler creed; he only 
unclasped the covers and let in additional rays of the Father's 
sunlight. 

"Who made the heart, 'tis He alone 

Decidedly can try us; 
He knows each chord — its various. tone, 

Each spring — its various bias; 
Then at the balance let's be mute, 

We never can adjust it; 
What's done we partly may compute, 

But know not what's resisted." 

His craving for mercy went down and touched the lowest 
of God's creatures. He felt for all that could feel. Any 
man who can wound a hare, or cause pain to a little mouse, 
may learn Theology from Burns. 

"Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie, 
O, what a panic's in thy breastie! 
I'm truly sorry man's dominion 
Has broken nature's social union, 
An' justifies that ill opinion, 

Which makes thee startle 
At me, thy poor earth-born companion, 

An' fellow-mortal!" 

He would forgive the little mouse its sins. There was 
room enough for both in the same cruel, grasping world. 

"I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve; 
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live! 
A daimen-icker in a thrave 

'S a sma' request; 
I'll get a blessing wi' the lave, 

An' never miss't!" 

Systems of Theology are but the externals, the outside 
alabaster that holds the Samaritan oil of God. 

Burns also improved the teaching of his day. Whoever 
does this is worthy of all praise. Youth had no recognition 
in the Scotch Church of one hundred years ago. It was an 

79 



age of doctrine. Birds were dumb, and olive branches thorny. 
There were two covenants: The solemn league and covenant, 
and the covenant of grace. The one of works had no con- 
sideration whatever. 

After so long a drought this must have come like the 
music of the latter rain: 

"I lang hae thought, my youthfu' friend, 
A something to have sent you, 
Tho' it should serve nae other end 

Than just a kind memento! 
Yet ne'er with wits profane to range, 

Be complaisance extended; 
An atheist's laugh's a poor exchange 

For Deity offended! 
But when on life we're tempest-driv'n, 

A conscience but a canker — 
A correspondence fix'd wi' heav'n — 
Is sure a noble anchor!" 

To this preaching the young men listened and some of 
the clergy were wise enough to ask what for. The beauties 
of nature found a place in the New Testament, but are from 
necessity excluded from all Theology. The Rose of Sharon 
takes no root in dogmatic dust, but Burns planted a daisy 
before every church door in Scotland and wrote a Theology 
upon its leaves that has saved many a young life. Ecclesi- 
astical discipline he hated. To him it was an adjourned ses- 
sion of Pilate's court, in too many instances sadly true. 

There are questions that arise to the surface of all poetry 
which no Theology can answer. "Man was made to Mourn," 
is the dirge of creation. 

"If I'm designed yon lordling's slave — 
By Nature's law designed — 
Why was an independent wish 
E'er planted in my mind?" 

That is the theory, but a contradictory reality confronts it. 

"If not, why am I subject to 
His cruelty or scorn? 
Or why has man the will and power 
To make his fellow mourn?" 

But the old Kirk had not taught him in vain. 

"The poor, oppressed, honest man, 
Had never, sure, been born, 
Had there not been some recompense 
To comfort those that mourn!" 
80 



His pitiful life created a sympathy which, apart from all 
else, made his countrymen better. 

Highland Mary became the Jcptha's daughter of Scot- 
land and whether one be sad or happy, there is a string in 
his harp that vibrates to every touch. As to his unfortunate 
career I am purposely silent. There are those who can see 
nothing in the parable of Dives and Lazarus but the dog at 
the gate. Let them throw stones upon his grave. He has 
been called the prodigal son of the Church, but moral dis- 
tances are not measured by feet. The elder son out in the 
field may be further away from the house than his younger 
brother. His career was for himself a failure, but for others a 
triumph. He died and the Church came to his funeral. Some 
are late getting there but they are on the way. He put 
a new song in the dumb lips of Scotland and taught her how 
to sing. He did more; he took her rough, rugged Theology, 
the best in the world, and made it better by the magic touch 
of his genius. 



Words O' Cheer 

Manuscript Poem Attributed to Burns, Presented by Joseph Welsh 

of Pasadena, through A. W. Douglas, to the 

Burns Club of St. Louis. 

Let Calvin, Knox and Luther cry 
"I hae the thruth, and I and I." 

Puir sinners, if ye gang agley, 
The Deil will hae ye, 

And then the Lord will stand abcigh 
And wunna save ye. 

But Hoolic! Hoolic! Nac sac fast 

When Gabriel shall blaw his blast 

And Heaven and Earth awa hae past, 
The Lang Syne saints 

Shall find baith Deil and Hell at last 
Mere pious feints. 

The upright, honest-hearted man, 
Who strives to do the best ha can 

Need never fear the Kirk's auld ban 
Or Hell's damnation; 

For God, He need nae special plan 
For oor salvation. 
81 



The anc wha feels our deepest needs 

Recks little how man counts his beads, 

For righteousness is not in creeds 
Nor solemn faces; 

But rather lies in kindly deeds 
And Christian graces. 

Then never fear, wae purpose leal, 
A head to think, a heart to feel 

For human wae or human weal, 
Nae preaching loon 

Your sacred birthright e'er can steal 
To Heaven abune. 

Take tent o' truth and heed it well; 

The man wha sins mak's his ain Hell, 
There's nae worse Deil than himself; 

But God is strongest, 
And when puir human hearts rebel 

He holds out longest. 



82 



The Burns Club 

of 

St. Louis 

W. K. Bixby W. F. Carter 

Scott. H. Blewett J. W. Dick 

Hanford Crawford A. W. Douglas 

Franklin Ferriss David R. Francis 

Alex. S. Greig George S. Johns 

Robert Johnston Frederick W. Lehmann 

John L. Lowes J. W. Maclvor 

William M. Portcous, William Marion Reedy 

George J. Tanscy Walter B. Stevens 

M. N. Sale George M. Wright 

David R. Calhoun Melville L. Wilkinson 



3n 90emoriam 



Joseph A. Graham Henry King 

Ben Blewett 



83 



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